ature had been generous to her, but she had done far more for
herself than Nature had. Her matchless skin, her figure, her hands, her
voice, were all the result of painstaking and intelligent care. Annie
had been a headstrong, undisciplined girl twenty years ago. She had come
back from a European visit, at twenty-three, with a vague if general
reputation of being "a terror." But Annie was clever, and she had real
charm. She spoke familiarly of European courts, had been presented even
in inaccessible Vienna. She spoke languages, quoted poets, had great
writers and painters for her friends, and rippled through songs that had
been indisputably dedicated, in flowing foreign hands, to the beautiful
Mademoiselle Melrose. Society bowed before Annie; she was the sensation
of her winter, and the marriage she promptly made was the most brilliant
in many winters.

Annie proceeded to bear her sober, fine, dull, and devoted Hendrick two
splendid sons, and thus riveted to herself his lasting devotion and
trust. The old name was safe, the millions would descend duly to young
Hendrick and Piet. The family had been rich, conspicuous, and respected
in the city, since its sturdy Holstein cattle had browsed along the
fields of lower Broadway, but under Annie's hands it began to shine.
Annie's handsome motor-cars bore the family arms, her china had been
made in the ancestral village, two miles from Rotterdam, and also
carried the shield. Her city home, in Fifth Avenue, was so magnificent,
so chastely restrained and sober, so sternly dignified, that it set the
cue for half the other homes of the ultra-aristocratic set. Annie's
servants had been in the Von Behrens family for years; there was nothing
in the Avenue house, or the Newport summer home, that was not as
handsome, as old, as solid, as carven, as richly dull, or as purely
shining, as human ingenuity could contrive to have it. Collectors saved
their choicest discoveries for Annie; and there was no painter in the
new world who would not have been proud to have Annie place a canvas of
his among her treasures from the old.

If family relics were worth preserving, what could be more remarkable
than Annie's Washington letter, her Jefferson tray, her Gainsboroughs of
the Murisons who had been the only Americans so honoured by the painter?
Melrose and Von Behrens honours crowded each other--here was the thin
old silver "shepherdess" cup awarded that Johanna von Behrens who had
won a prize wi