ration of
laughing voices and subdued calling, and the fainter strains of
mechanical music, the beat of popular marches and attenuated voices of
celebrated singers.

The motor turned suddenly in to the curb, and they got out. The house
before them, like its fellows, was entered from a high flight of red
sandstone steps, and was built of a smooth, soapy green stone, with red
coursings, an elaborate cornice and tiled Italian roof. No one was
sitting outside, although there was a pile of circular, grass-woven
cushions; and Howat sharply rang the bell. A maid in aproned black
admitted them into a narrow hall, from which stairs mounted with a
carved rail terminating in a newel post supporting an almost life-sized
bronze nymph, whose flowing hair was encircled by a wreath of
electrically lit flowers, and who held a dully shining sheaf of
jonquils. There was no other illumination, and Howat Penny discovered in
the obscurity a high mirror bristling with elk horns, on which hung
various hats and outer garments. He stood helpless, apparently, in an
attitude he found impossible to deny himself, waiting to be relieved of
his coverings, when Mariana whispered angrily, "Don't be so rotten,
Howat."

Finally the maid secured his cape, and he was conscious of a stir at the
head of the stairs. Immediately after, a shrill, subdued voice carried
to where he stood. "I told you," it said violently, "... dress suit."
There was an answering murmur, in which he could distinguish, James
Polder's impatient tones. The latter descended, and flooded the hall
with, light from a globe in the ceiling. He was garbed in blue serge and
flannels. "Isabella," he stated directly, belligerently even, "thinks we
ought to change our clothes; but we never do, and I wouldn't hear of--of
lying for effect." Howat Penny's dislike for him pleasantly increased.
Mariana, in rose crepe with a soft, dull gold girdle and long,
trumpet-like sleeves of flowered gauze, smiled at him warmly. "It is a
harmless pose of Howat's," she explained: "a concession to the ghosts of
the past." She patted the elder on the shoulder.

Above, James Polder ushered them into a room hung with crimson and gilt
stamped paper, an elaborately fretted cherry mantel about the asbestos
rectangle of an artificial hearth, and a multitude of chairs and divans
shrouded in linen. There was an upright, ebonized piano draped in a
fringed, Roman scarf and holding a towering jar of roses, a great,
carved