mpatience. "I see I'd better tell you why I did not
go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken
from you. And when they refused, I refused to go."

"I don't care why you refused, or imagined you refused," said I. "I am
content with the fact that you are here."

"But you misunderstand it," she answered coldly.

"I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it," was my reply. "I accept
it."

She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room--you, who love or
at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see _Her_
moving about in those rooms of mine.

While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been
thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or
three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of
my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face.
"What if 'they' should include Roebuck!" And just as a man begins to defend
himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so
I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible
or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat
over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: "I'm
going out for a few minutes--perhaps an hour--if any one should ask." A
moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's.

* * * * *

When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude
palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the
first excitement of their new wealth--a house with porches and balconies
and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the
eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his
name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said "rich as
Roebuck" where they used to say "rich as Croesus," he cut away every kind
of ostentation, and avoided attention.

He took advantage of his having to remove to New York where his vast
interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, far a rich man,
even mean house in East Fifty-Second Street--one of a raw, and an almost
dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with
one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. To his
few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down
from his Chicago splendors