wing how to fill them to the
brim.

The letter was from Mr. Fleischhauer, who begged to transmit to the
Marquis de Chelles an offer for his Boucher tapestries from a client
prepared to pay the large sum named on condition that it was accepted
before his approaching departure for America.

"What does it mean?" Raymond continued, as she did not speak.

"How should I know? It's a lot of money," she stammered, shaken out of
her self-possession. She had not expected so prompt a sequel to the
dealer's visit, and she was vexed with him for writing to Raymond
without consulting her. But she recognized Moffatt's high-handed way,
and her fears faded in the great blaze of the sum he offered.

Her husband was still looking at her. "It was Fleischhauer who brought a
man down to see the tapestries one day when I was away at Beaune?"

He had known, then--everything was known at Saint Desert!

She wavered a moment and then gave him back his look.

"Yes--it was Fleischhauer; and I sent for him."

"You sent for him?"

He spoke in a voice so veiled and repressed that he seemed to be
consciously saving it for some premeditated outbreak. Undine felt its
menace, but the thought of Moffatt sent a flame through her, and the
words he would have spoken seemed to fly to her lips.

"Why shouldn't I? Something had to be done. We can't go on as we are.
I've tried my best to economize--I've scraped and scrimped, and gone
without heaps of things I've always had. I've moped for months and
months at Saint Desert, and given up sending Paul to school because it
was too expensive, and asking my friends to dine because we couldn't
afford it. And you expect me to go on living like this for the rest of
my life, when all you've got to do is to hold out your hand and have two
million francs drop into it!"

Her husband stood looking at her coldly and curiously, as though she
were some alien apparition his eyes had never before beheld.

"Ah, that's your answer--that's all you feel when you lay hands on
things that are sacred to us!" He stopped a moment, and then let his
voice break out with the volume she had felt it to be gathering. "And
you're all alike," he exclaimed, "every one of you. You come among us
from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, a country you care for
so little that before you've been a day in ours you've forgotten the
very house you were born in--if it wasn't torn down before you knew it!
You come among us speaking our la