ner.

"Howard," she asked presently, "why do you come to Newport at all?"

"Why do I come to Newport?" he repeated. "I don't understand you."

"Why do you come up here every week?"

"Well," he said, "it isn't a bad trip on the boat, and I get a change
from New York; and see men I shouldn't probably see otherwise." He
paused and looked at her again, doubtfully. "Why do you ask such a
question?"

"I wished to be sure," said Honora.

"Sure of what?"

"That the-arrangement suited you perfectly. You do not feel--the lack of
anything, do you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You wouldn't care to stay in Newport all the time?"

"Not if I know myself," he replied. "I leave that part of it to you."

"What part of it?" she demanded.

"You ought to know. You do it pretty well," he laughed. "By the way,
Honora, I've got to have a conference with Mr. Wing to-day, and I may
not be home to lunch."

"We're dining there to-night," she told him, in a listless voice.

Upon Ethel Wing had descended the dominating characteristics of the
elder James, who, whatever the power he might wield in Wall Street, was
little more than a visitor in Newport. It was Ethel's house, from the
hour she had swept the Reel and Carter plans (which her father had
brought home) from the table and sent for Mr. Farwell. The forehanded
Reginald arrived with a sketch, and the result, as every one knows,
is one of the chief monuments to his reputation. So exquisitely
proportioned is its simple, two-storied marble front as seen through the
trees left standing on the old estate, that tourists, having beheld the
Chamberlin and other mansions, are apt to think this niggardly for a
palace. Two infolding wings, stretching towards the water, enclose
a court, and through the slender white pillars of the peristyle one
beholds in fancy the summer seas of Greece.

Looking out on the court, and sustaining this classic illusion, is a
marble-paved dining room, with hangings of Pompeiian red, and frescoes
of nymphs and satyrs and piping shepherds, framed between fluted
pilasters, dimly discernible in the soft lights.

In the midst of these surroundings, at the head of his table, sat the
great financier whose story but faintly concerns this chronicle; the
man who, every day that he had spent down town in New York in the past
thirty years, had eaten the same meal in the same little restaurant
under the street. This he told Honora, on his left, as though it were
not history