Cally, arrested at the foot of the steps, stared at her mother.
"Why--not that I know of. What do you mean?"

Now her mother looked somewhat disappointed, but said, snapping a glove
button: "It would be like him to do it, and say not a word to anybody.
Why, there's a foolish story Mrs. Wayne told me this morning that the
whole thing had fallen through, when Mrs. Berkeley Page came forward
anonymously with a gift of twenty-five thousand--simply buying the
building outright, in fact. I don't, of course, believe a word of it.
She's exactly the kind to let her right hand know what her left was
doing. Still, I did think perhaps Hugo might possibly have done
something of the sort. He was so interested--he spoke of the Settlement
to me only yesterday...."

The girl gazed at her mother, and a sudden light broke into her eyes.
Across her memory there flashed Canning's cryptic remark, only the other
night: "We'll show him something about giving away money some day."...
This, then, was what he had meant: perhaps he had already done it that
night. She knew that Hugo had curiously disliked Dr. Vivian at sight,
and that, by the bond between her and him, he had somehow entered into
her own feminine feeling that to give handsomely to the fellow's own
charity (to which he himself gave nothing at all) was to show him up
completely in the interest of public morals. The gift of such a sum as
twenty-five thousand dollars simply exploded him off the horizon....

Her heart glowing toward her understanding lover, she clapped her small
hands and cried: "He did!--I remember something he said about it now.
Oh, I _know_ he did!"