voice, "to a
class of girls in New York."

The General laughed.

"She seems to have made a fool of you, my dear boy. She is one of the
great heiresses of America."

Roger's face expressed a proper astonishment.

"Oh! that's it, is it? I thought once or twice there was something
fishy--she was trying it on. Who told you?"

The General retailed his information. Miss Daphne Floyd was the orphan
daughter of an enormously rich and now deceased lumber-king, of the
State of Illinois. He had made vast sums by lumbering, and then invested
in real estate in Chicago and Buffalo, not to speak of a railway or two,
and had finally left his daughter and only child in possession of a
fortune generally estimated at more than a million sterling. The money
was now entirely in the girl's power. Her trustees had been sent about
their business, though Miss Floyd was pleased occasionally to consult
them. Mrs. Phillips, her chaperon, had not much influence with her; and
it was supposed that Mrs. Verrier advised her more than anyone else.

"Good heavens!" was all that young Barnes could find to say when the
story was told. He walked on absently, flourishing his stick, his face
working under the stress of amused meditation. At last he brought out:

"You know, Uncle Archie, if you'd heard some of the things Miss Floyd
was saying to me, your hair would have stood on end."

The General raised his shoulders.

"I dare say. I'm too old-fashioned for America. The sooner I clear out
the better. Their newspapers make me sick; I hate the hotels--I hate the
cooking; and there isn't a nation in Europe I don't feel myself more at
home with."

Roger laughed his clear, good-tempered laugh. "Oh! I don't feel that way
at all. I get on with them capitally. They're a magnificent people. And,
as to Miss Floyd, I didn't mean anything bad, of course. Only the ideas
some of the girls here have, and the way they discuss them--well, it
beats me!"

"What sort of ideas?"

Roger's handsome brow puckered in the effort to explain. "They don't
think anything's _settled_, you know, as we do at home. Miss Floyd
doesn't. They think _they've_ got to settle a lot of things that English
girls don't trouble about, because they're just told to do 'em, or not
to do 'em, by the people that look after them!"

"'Everything hatched over again, and hatched different,'" said the
General, who was an admirer of George Eliot; "that's what they'd like,
eh? Pooh! That's when th