wretched days in Louisville had
affected Berenice. Most of those with whom Mrs. Carter had found
herself compelled to deal would be kind enough to keep her secret. But
there were others. How near she had been to drifting on the rocks when
Cowperwood had appeared!

"After all," observed Berenice, thoughtfully, "Mr. Cowperwood isn't a
mere money-grabber, is he? So many of these Western moneyed men are so
dull."

"My dear," exclaimed Mrs. Carter, who by now had become a confirmed
satellite of her secret protector, "you don't understand him at all.
He is a very astonishing man, I tell you. The world is certain to hear
a lot more of Frank Cowperwood before he dies. You can say what you
please, but some one has to make the money in the first place. It's
little enough that good breeding does for you in poverty. I know,
because I've seen plenty of our friends come down."

In the new house, on a scaffold one day, a famous sculptor and his
assistants were at work on a Greek frieze which represented dancing
nymphs linked together by looped wreaths. Berenice and her mother
happened to be passing. They stopped to look, and Cowperwood joined
them. He waved his hand at the figures of the frieze, and said to
Berenice, with his old, gay air, "If they had copied you they would
have done better."

"How charming of you!" she replied, with her cool, strange, blue eyes
fixed on him. "They are beautiful." In spite of her earlier prejudices
she knew now that he and she had one god in common--Art; and that his
mind was fixed on things beautiful as on a shrine.

He merely looked at her.

"This house can be little more than a museum to me," he remarked,
simply, when her mother was out of hearing; "but I shall build it as
perfectly as I can. Perhaps others may enjoy it if I do not."

She looked at him musingly, understandingly, and he smiled. She
realized, of course, that he was trying to convey to her that he was
lonely.

Chapter LI

The Revival of Hattie Starr

Engrossed in the pleasures and entertainments which Cowperwood's money
was providing, Berenice had until recently given very little thought to
her future. Cowperwood had been most liberal. "She is young," he once
said to Mrs. Carter, with an air of disinterested liberality, when they
were talking about Berenice and her future. "She is an exquisite. Let
her have her day. If she marries well she can pay you back, or me.
But give her all she needs now."