y to see
repeated what I have witnessed in the last six months."

Mr. Fern seemed to have lost all ambition for controversy. His elder
daughter's cutting words evidently hurt, but he would not reply.

Mr. Weil came to the rescue by introducing a new topic of conversation,
that of a European tenor that was soon expected to startle New York.
Daisy went to the piano, and played softly, talking in whispers to
Roseleaf, who leaned feverishly over her shoulder. But she made no
allusion to Hannibal, and he did his best to forget him.

"What do you make of that?" asked Mr. Weil, when he was in a railway
car, on the way back to the city with his young friend. "A glorious
chance for a novelist to find the reason that black Adonis is allowed
such latitude."

But Roseleaf was not listening. He was thinking of a sweet voice that
had said: "You are a dear boy and I love you!"

CHAPTER XIV.

"LET US HAVE A BETRAYAL."

Mr. Archie Weil had become quite intimate with Mr. Wilton Fern; so much
so that he called at his office every few days, took walks with him on
business errands, went with him to lunch (to the annoyance of Lawrence
Gouger, who did not like to eat alone) and sometimes took the train home
with him at night, on evenings when Shirley Roseleaf was not of the
party. Everybody in the Fern family liked Archie. Even Hannibal, who had
conceived a veritable hatred for Roseleaf, brightened at the entrance of
Mr. Weil either at the house or office, the negro seeming to alternate
between the two places very much as he pleased. Millicent liked him
because he was so "facile," as she expressed it; a man with whom one
could talk without feeling it necessary to pick each step. Daisy liked
him because her father did, and because Roseleaf did, and because he
treated her with marked politeness that had apparently no double
meaning.

And they all got confidential with him, which was exactly what he wanted
them to do; only the one he most wanted to give him confidence gave him
the least. This was Mr. Fern, himself.

Try as he might, Archie could not discover what clouded the brow of the
wool merchant, what made him act like a person who fears each knock at
the door, each sound of a human voice in the hallway of his office. He
could find no reason for Mr. Fern's attitude toward Hannibal, whose
manners were as far removed as possible from those supposed to belong to
a personal servant. There must be a cause of no ordinary charac