to descend. "This house is to be sold--and everything
in it--"

"Which is one more reason why we should be married without delay. I
say," he added, in another tone, "let's have him in."

"Oh no! What for?"

Before she could object further, Ashley had slipped out into the hall.

"I say! Come along in."

His attitude as he stood with hands thrust into his jacket pockets and
shoulders squared bespoke conscious superiority to the man whom he was
addressing. Though Davenant was not in her line of vision she could
divine his astonishment at this easy, English unceremoniousness, as well
as his resentment to the tone of command. She heard him muttering an
excuse which Ashley interrupted with his offhand "Oh, come in. Miss
Guion would like to see you."

She felt it her duty to go forward and second this invitation. Davenant,
who was standing at the foot of the staircase, murmured something about
town and business.

"It's too late for town and business at this hour," Ashley objected.
"Come in."

He withdrew toward the room where Olivia was standing between the
portieres of the doorway. Davenant yielded, partly because of his
ignorance of the small arts of graceful refusal, but more because of his
curiosity concerning the man Olivia Guion was to marry. He had some
interest, too, in observing one who was chosen where he himself had been
rejected. It would afford an answer to the question, "What lack I yet?"
with which he was tormented at all times. That it could not be a
flattering answer was plain to him from the careless, indefinable graces
of Ashley's style. It was a style that Davenant would have scorned to
imitate, but which nevertheless he envied. In contrast with its
unstudied ease he could feel his own social methods to be labored and
apologetic. Where he was watchful to do the right thing, what Ashley
said or did became the right thing because he said or did it. With the
echo of soft English vowels and clear, crisp consonants in his ears, his
own pronunciations, too, were rough with the harshness transmitted from
an ancestry to whom the melody of speech had been of no more practical
concern than the music of the spheres.

Something of all this Olivia guessed. She guessed it with a feeling of
being on his side--on the American side--which a month ago would have
astonished her. She guessed, too, on Davenant's part, that feeling of
irritation which the calm assumptions of the Old World are likely to
create when in