rk. I'm afraid we've got to cut it short."

To his astonishment she smiled.

"Oh, I'm so glad, Howard," she cried. "I--I don't like this place nearly
so well as New Orleans. There are--so many people here."

He looked relieved, and patted her on the arm.

"We'll go to-night, old girl," he said.

CHAPTER II. "STAFFORD PARK"

There is a terrifying aspect of all great cities. Rome, with its
leviathan aqueducts, its seething tenements clinging to the hills, its
cruel, shining Palatine, must have overborne the provincial traveller
coming up from Ostia. And Honora, as she stood on the deck of the
ferry-boat, approaching New York for the second time in her life, could
not overcome a sense of oppression. It was on a sharp December morning,
and the steam of the hurrying craft was dazzling white in the early sun.
Above and beyond the city rose, overpowering, a very different city,
somehow, than that her imagination had first drawn. Each of that
multitude of vast towers seemed a fortress now, manned by Celt and Hun
and, Israelite and Saxon, captained by Titans. And the strife between
them was on a scale never known in the world before, a strife with
modern arms and modern methods and modern brains, in which there was no
mercy.

Hidden somewhere amidst those bristling miles of masonry to the
northward of the towers was her future home. Her mind dwelt upon it now,
for the first time, and tried to construct it. Once she had spoken to
Howard of it, but he had smiled and avoided discussion. What would it be
like to have a house of one's own in New York? A house on Fifth Avenue,
as her girl friends had said when they laughingly congratulated her and
begged her to remember that they came occasionally to New York. Those
of us who, like Honora, believe in Providence, do not trouble ourselves
with mere matters of dollars and cents. This morning, however, the huge
material towers which she gazed upon seemed stronger than Providence,
and she thought of her husband. Was his fibre sufficiently tough to
become eventually the captain of one of those fortresses, to compete
with the Maitlands and the Wings, and others she knew by name, calmly
and efficiently intrenched there?

The boat was approaching the slip, and he came out to her from the
cabin, where he had been industriously reading the stock reports, his
newspapers thrust into his overcoat pocket.

"There's no place like New York, after all," he declared, and added,
"when th