r Mildred, why, with her beauty and her cleverness
she could not but make a brilliant marriage. Really, there was for him
no problem of an orphaned family's future; there was no reason why he
should deny himself any comfort or luxury, or his vanity any of the
titillations that come from social display.

That one of his calculations which was the most vital and seemed the
surest proved to be worthless. It is not the weaklings who die, after
infancy and youth, but the strong, healthy men and women. The
weaklings have to look out for themselves, receive ample warning in the
disastrous obvious effects of the slightest imprudence. The robust,
even the wariest of them, even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and
overtax their strength. Gower's downfall was champagne. He could not
resist a bottle of it for dinner every night. As so often happens, the
collapse of the kidneys came without any warning that a man of powerful
constitution would deem worthy of notice. By the time the doctor began
to suspect the gravity of his trouble he was too far gone.

Frank, candidly greedy and selfish--"Such a contrast to his father!"
everyone said--was married to the prettiest girl in Hanging Rock and
had a satisfactory law practice in New York. His income was about
fifteen thousand a year. But his wife had tastes as extravagant as his
own; and Hanging Rock is one of those suburbs of New York where gather
well-to-do middle-class people to live luxuriously and to delude each
other and themselves with the notion that they are fashionable, rich
New Yorkers who prefer to live in the country "like the English." Thus,
Henry Gower's widow and daughter could count on little help from
Frank--and they knew it.

"You and Milly will have to move to some less expensive place than
Hanging Rock," said Frank--it was the living-room conference a few days
after the funeral.

Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed. She opened her lips to
speak--closed them again with the angry retort unuttered. After all,
Frank was her mother's and her sole dependence. They could hope for
little from him, but nothing must be said that would give him and his
mean, selfish wife a chance to break with them and refuse to do
anything whatever.

"And Mildred must get married," said Natalie. In Hanging Rock most of
the girls and many of the boys had given names taken from Burke's
Peerage, the Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.

Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did