business?"

"Yes, it's business."

"Well, I'm just in the humor for business; I've had enough pleasure."

"I don't see why Louise shouldn't stay and talk business with us, if she
likes. I think it's a pity to keep women out of it, as if it didn't
concern them," said the son. "Nine-tenths of the time it concerns them
more than it does men." He had a bright, friendly, philosophical smile
in saying this, and he stood waiting for his sister to be gone, with a
patience which their father did not share. He stood something over six
feet in his low shoes, and his powerful frame seemed starting out of the
dress-suit, which it appeared so little related to. His whole face was
handsome and regular, and his full beard did not wholly hide a mouth of
singular sweetness.

"Yes; I think so too, in the abstract," said the father. "If the
business were mine, or were business in the ordinary sense of the
term--"

"Why, why did you say it was business at all, then?" The girl put her
arms round her father's neck and let her head-scarf fall on the rug a
little way from her cloak and her arctics. "If you hadn't said it was
business, I should have been in bed long ago." Then, as if feeling her
father's eagerness to have her gone, she said, "Good night," and gave
him a kiss, and a hug or two more, and said "Good night, Matt," and got
herself away, letting a long glove trail somewhere out of her dress, and
stretch its weak length upon the floor after her, as if it were trying
to follow her.

VIII.

Louise's father, in turning to look from her toward his son, felt
himself slightly pricked in the cheek by the pin that had transferred
itself from her neck-gear to his coat collar, and Matt went about
picking up the cloak, the arctics, the scarf and the glove. He laid the
cloak smoothly on the leathern lounge, and arranged the scarf and glove
on it, and set the arctics on the floor in a sort of normal relation to
it, and then came forward in time to relieve his father of the pin that
was pricking him, and that he was rolling his eyes out of his head to
get sight of.

"What in the devil is that?" he roared.

"Louise's pin," said Matt, as placidly as if that were quite the place
for it, and its function were to prick her father in the cheek. He went
and pinned it into her scarf, and then he said, "It's about Northwick, I
suppose."

"Yes," said his father, still furious from the pinprick. "I'm afraid the
miserable scoundrel is goi