st not break my poor heart after taking it by storm. I want you, and
shall keep you if I were ten times as rich and you were in rags. What
joy has money brought hitherto in my short life? It killed my mother,
and has alienated me from my father. It has driven me to the verge of
a folly I now shudder at. It has caused death and suffering to men
whom I have never seen. It has separated a man and a woman who love
each other even as you and I love. If I were a poor girl, working for
a living in office or shop, I should know what laughter meant, and
cheerfulness, and the bright careless hours when the heart is light and
the world goes well. You have brought these things to me, dear, and
you must not take them away now. I forbid it. I deny you that
wrongful act with my very soul. . . . John, do you wish to see me in
tears on this--our first day--together?"

Brodie summed up the remainder of the situation with unconscious
accuracy in a subsequent disquisition delivered to an admiring circle
in the servants' hall at Mrs. Morgan Apjohn's house.

"Spooning is a right and proper thing in the right and proper place,"
he said, "but Central Park on a fine morning is not the locality. I
was jogging along comfortably when I saw some guys in Columbus Plaza
rubbering around at the car, and grinning like clowns at a circus, so I
just opened up the engine a bit, and let her rip, except when a mounted
cop cocked his eye at me. But, bless you, them two inside didn't care
if it snowed. When I brought 'em back to the hotel, Mr. Curtis sez to
me: 'We've enjoyed that ride thoroughly, Brodie, but I had a notion
that Central Park was larger.' Dash me, I took 'em over nine miles of
roadway, and they thought I had gone in at 59th Street and come out at
Eighth Avenue."

Devar, too, appreciated the success of his maneuver when he saw
Hermione's sparkling eyes and Curtis's complacent air.

"Have you got a sister, Lady Hermione?" he asked _a propos_ to nothing
which she or any other person had said.

"No," she answered, without the semblance of a blush.

"I was only wondering," he said. "If you had, you might have cabled
for her. I'd just love to take her round the Park in that car."

But the rest of that day, not to mention many successive days, was
devoted to other matters than love-making. Shoals of interviewers
descended on Curtis and Hermione, on Devar, on Uncle Horace and Aunt
Louisa, on Brodie, even on Mrs. Morgan Apjohn