, conceived a mournful pride.

Old New Yorkers all, knowing no other city, no other bourne north of
Tenth Street or west of Chelsea--silent, serene, drab-toned people,
whose drawing-rooms were musty with what had been fragrance once, whose
science, religion, interests, desires were the beliefs, interests and
emotions of a century ago, their colourless existence and passive
snobbishness affronted nobody who did not come seeking affront.

To them Theodore Thomas had been the last conductor; his orchestra the
last musical expression fit for a cultivated society; the Academy of
Music remained their last symphonic temple, Wallack's the last refuge of
a drama now dead for ever.

Delmonico's had been their northern limit, Stuyvesant Square their
eastern, old Trinity their southern, and their western, Chelsea. Outside
there was nothing. The blatancy and gilt of the million-voiced
metropolis fell on closed eyes, and on ears attuned only to the murmurs
of the past. They lived in their ancient houses and went abroad and
summered in some simple old-time hamlet hallowed by the headstones of
their grandsires, and existed as meaninglessly and blamelessly as the
old catalpa trees spreading above their dooryards.

And into this narrow circle Louis Neville and his sister Lily had been
born.

It had been a shock to her parents when Lily married Gordon Collis, a
mining engineer from Denver. She came to see them with her husband every
year; Collis loved her enough to endure it.

As for Louis' career, his achievements, his work, they regarded it
without approval. Their last great painters had been Bierstadt and Hart,
their last great sculptor, Powers. Blankly they gazed upon the
splendours of the mural symphonies achieved by the son and heir of all
the Nevilles; they could not comprehend the art of the Uitlanders; their
comment was silence and dignity.

To them all had become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human
emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had
become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent,
temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a worn-out
civilisation.

So, under the circumstances, it was scarcely to be wondered that Neville
hesitated to introduce the subject of Valerie West as he sat in the
parlour at Spindrift House with his father and mother, reading the
_Tribune_ or the _Evening Post_ or poring over some ancient tome of
travels, or looking