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Sanctuary by Edith Wharton
page 61 of 98 (62%)

Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. "Is there no one who can do this
for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work."

Dick shook his head. "Not lately. He hasn't had much to do this winter, and
these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans."

The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton's cheek. It was the first
allusion that either of them had made to Darrow's bequest.

"Oh, of course you must do all you can," she murmured, turning alone into
the house.

The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home
during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety,
on the thought of poor Darrow's devotion. She had given him too little
time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of
seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not
been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved
him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow's letter, filled her
with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a
deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a
man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions
of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend's
overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it
had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.

The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton's thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not,
surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height
of his friend's devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it
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