rk any place else, isn't it?"

He would not agree that it was "bound to"--yet, being pressed, was
driven to admit that "it might," and, retiring from what was developing
into an oratorical contest, repeated a warning about not "putting too
much into it."

George Amberson also laid stress on this caution later, though the Major
had "financed him" again, and he was "going in." "You must be careful
to leave yourself a 'margin of safety,' Fanny," he said. "I'm confident
that is a pretty conservative investment of its kind, and all the
chances are with us, but you must be careful to leave yourself enough to
fall back on, in case anything should go wrong."

Fanny deceived him. In the impossible event of "anything going wrong"
she would have enough left to "live on," she declared, and laughed
excitedly, for she was having the best time that had come to her since
Wilbur's death. Like so many women for whom money has always been
provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a
thorough and irresponsible plunger.

Amberson, in his wearier way, shared her excitement, and in the winter,
when the exploiting company had been formed, and he brought Fanny, her
importantly engraved shares of stock, he reverted to his prediction of
possibilities, made when they first spoke of the new light.

"We seem to be partners, all right," he laughed. "Now let's go ahead and
be millionaires before Isabel and young George come home."

"When they come home!" she echoed sorrowfully--and it was a phrase which
found an evasive echo in Isabel's letters. In these letters Isabel was
always planning pleasant things that she and Fanny and the Major and
George and "brother George" would do--when she and her son came home.
"They'll find things pretty changed, I'm afraid," Fanny said. "If they
ever do come home!"

Amberson went over, the next summer, and joined his sister and nephew in
Paris, where they were living. "Isabel does want to come home," he told
Fanny gravely, on the day of his return, in October. "She's wanted
to for a long while--and she ought to come while she can stand the
journey--" And he amplified this statement, leaving Fanny looking
startled and solemn when Lucy came by to drive him out to dinner at the
new house Eugene had just completed.

This was no white-and-blue cottage, but a great Georgian picture in
brick, five miles north of Amberson Addition, with four acres of its
own hedged land between it and its next n