dness of home, for
her Lenten visit to the Willings. Through the interval the dreariness of
life continued; Canning was reported in Cuba; she had abandoned all
thought of a little note. The nephew she saw no more; but it chanced
that she came to hear his name on many lips. For on the cold morning of
the birthday of the Father of his Country, old Armistead Beirne, whom
three doctors had pronounced all but a well man, was found dead in his
bed: and a few days later, by the probation of his will, it became known
that of his fortune of some two hundred thousand dollars, he had left
one-fifth to his eccentric nephew in the Dabney House.

XV

In which she goes to New York, and is very Happy indeed.

Mrs. Willing was twenty-four, handsome, expensive, lively, and intensely
fond of what she thought was pleasure. Willing was thirty-two, and had a
close-clipped mustache: there were ten thousand men in New York whom you
might have mistaken for him at twenty paces. He was assistant something
on a nineteenth story downtown, and his scale of living continually
crowded his income to the wall. The Willings--there were, of course, but
two of them--had the kind of home which farmers' daughters so envy the
heroines of "society" novels. They lived in a showy apartment hotel in
the West Fifties, kept a motor-car, and went out for dinner. In fact
"out" was the favorite word in the establishment: the Willings did
everything but sleep "out."

"I can't bear to stick at home," said Mrs. Willing to Carlisle. "I've
always _loved_ to go places."

And places they went from one end of Carlisle's visit to the other. The
shops in the morning, downtown on a rush to lunch with Willing, back to
Broadway for a matinee, back home at the double-quick to dress for
dinner, to the theatre after dinner, to supper after the theatre. There
was always hurry; there was never quite time to reach any of the places
at the hour agreed.

"That's the fun!" said Florrie Willing. "Rush, rush, rush from morning
to night. That's little old New York in a nutshell."

Carlisle had expected to be thoroughly diverted by the rattle, bang, and
glitter in which the Willings lived, but in this she was only partially
gratified. Pure restlessness, it seemed, had entered her blood: she was
no sooner fairly settled in the Wrexham than she began to wish herself
back home again. The vague thought pursued her, even at the places, that
she was missing something; that