career and fame.
Unimagined numbers of America's women possess that quality--a fact that
is becoming more and more apparent every day.

"Why, Honora!" Howard exclaimed, as she appeared at the breakfast table.
"What's happened to you?"

"Have you forgotten already," she asked, smilingly, as she poured out
her coffee, "that we are going to town together?"

He readjusted his newspaper against the carafe.

"How much do you think Mrs. Farnham--or Mrs. Rindge--is worth?" he
asked.

"I'm sure I don't know," she replied.

"Old Marshall left her five million dollars."

"What has that to do with it?" inquired Honora.

"She isn't going to rent, especially in that part of town, for nothing."

"Wouldn't it be wiser, Howard, to wait and see the house. You know you
proposed it yourself, and it won't take very much of your time."

He returned to a perusal of the financial column, but his eye from
time to time wandered from the sheet to his wife, who was reading her
letters.

"Howard," she said, "I feel dreadfully about Mrs. Holt. We haven't been
at Silverdale all summer. Here's a note from her saying she'll be in
town to-morrow for the Charities Conference, asking me to come to see
her at her hotel. I think I'll go to Silverdale a little later."

"Why don't you?" he said. "It would do you good."

"And you?" she asked.

"My only day of the week is Sunday, Honora. You know that. And I
wouldn't spend another day at Silverdale if they gave me a deed to the
property," he declared.

On the train, when Howard had returned from the smoking car and they
were about to disembark at Long Island City, they encountered Mr.
Trixton Brent.

"Whither away?" he cried in apparent astonishment. "Up at dawn, and the
eight o'clock train!"

"We were going to look at a house," explained Honora, "and Howard has no
other time."

"I'll go, too," declared Mr. Brent, promptly. "You mightn't think me a
judge of houses, but I am. I've lived in so many bad ones that I know a
good one when I see it now."

"Honora has got a wild notion into her head that I'm going to take
the Farnham house," said Howard, smiling. There, on the deck of the
ferryboat, in the flooding sunlight, the idea seemed to give him
amusement. With the morning light Pharaoh must have hardened his heart.

"Well, perhaps you are," said Mr. Brent, conveying to Honora his delight
in the situation by a scarcely perceptible wink. "I shouldn't like to
take the other end of the b