tas of little grey houses rose before his eyes) he
actually lived another life where someone called him "Bob." Bob! And
this, too, was a revelation. Bob! Why, of course, it was the only name
for him! A bell rang.

"That's your uncle"; and again the head clerk's voice sounded ironical.
"Good-bye, sir."

He seemed to clip off intercourse as one clips off electric light.
Shelton left him writing, and preceded the red-haired boy to an enormous
room in the front where his uncle waited.

Edmund Paramor was a medium-sized and upright man of seventy, whose brown
face was perfectly clean-shaven. His grey, silky hair was brushed in a
cock's comb from his fine forehead, bald on the left side. He stood
before the hearth facing the room, and his figure had the springy
abruptness of men who cannot fatten. There was a certain youthfulness,
too, in his eyes, yet they had a look as though he had been through fire;
and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles. The room was
like the man--morally large, void of red-tape and almost void of
furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers littered
up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of the law
reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose in a
glass of water. It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity, who
went to the heart of things, despised haggling, and before whose smiles
the more immediate kinds of humbug faded.

"Well, Dick," said he, "how's your mother?"

Shelton replied that his mother was all right.

"Tell her that I'm going to sell her Easterns after all, and put into
this Brass thing. You can say it's safe, from me."

Shelton made a face.

"Mother," said he, "always believes things are safe."

His uncle looked through him with his keen, half-suffering glance, and up
went the corners of his mouth.

"She's splendid," he said.

"Yes," said Shelton, "splendid."

The transaction, however, did not interest him; his uncle's judgment in
such matters had a breezy soundness he would never dream of questioning.

"Well, about your settlement"; and, touching a bell three times, Mr.
Paramor walked up and down the room. "Bring me the draft of Mr.
Richard's marriage settlement."

The stalwart commissionaire reappearing with a document--"Now then,
Dick," said Mr. Paramor. "She 's not bringing anything into settlement,
I understand; how 's that?"

"I did n't want it," replied Shelton, una