what I call a chance."

"Chance for what, mother?"

"Chance for a good many things--and first of all for bearding Lucilla
van Tromp right in her own den."

"I don't see--"

"No; but I do. We're on to a big thing. I've got to go right there; and
she's got to come right here. She's held off, and she's kept me off; but
now the ice'll be broken with a regular thaw."

"Still, I don't see. It's one thing to invite her, to oblige old man Van
Tromp; but it's another thing to get her to come."

"She'll come fast enough--this time; she'll come as if she was shot here
by a secret spring. There is a secret spring, you may take my word for
it. I don't know what it is, and I don't care; it's enough for me to
know that it's in good working order--which it is, if James van Tromp
has got his hand on it. James van Tromp may look like a fool and talk
like a fool, but he isn't a fool--No, sir!"

It is commonly believed that a woman never thinks otherwise than gently
of the man who has wanted to marry her; and if this be the rule, Mrs.
Wappinger was no exception to it. As she sat on the sofa in her son's
room, the mere mention of the old man's name, attended by the kindly
opinion she had just expressed, sent her off into sudden reverie. While
it was quite true that, in her own phrase, she "would no more have
married him than she would have married a mole," it was none the less
flattering to have been desired. The onlooker, like Lucilla van Tromp or
Derek Pruyn, might wonder what were those hidden forces of affinity
which led a man to single Mrs. Wappinger out of all the women in the
world; but to Mrs. Wappinger herself the circumstance could not be
otherwise than pleasing.

Seeing her pensive, Carli swung himself back to the keyboard again,
pounding out a few bars of the dance music in Strauss' _Salome_, of
which the score lay open before him. He was a good-looking young man of
twenty-two, of whom any mother, not too exacting, might be proud. Very
blond--with well-chiselled features and waving hair--not so tall as to
make his excessive slimness seem disproportionate--there was something
in the perfection with which he was "turned out" that gave him the air
of a "creation." Mrs. Wappinger's joy in him was the more satisfying
because of the fact that, relative to herself, he was in the line of
progress. He was the blossom of culture, travel, and sport, borne by her
own strenuous generation of successful material effort. To the things