departure.

* * * * *

But no later than that evening he began to perceive why the oracle had
spoken. Claude having excused himself from dressing for dinner on the
ground of another mysterious engagement with Billy Cheever, and Mrs.
Masterman having retired up-stairs, Thor was alone in the library with
his father.

It was a mellow room, in which the bindings of long rows of books,
mostly purchased by Grandpa Thorley in "sets," an admirable white-marble
chimney=piece in a Georgian style, and a few English eighteenth-century
prints added by Archie Masterman himself, disguised the heavy
architectural taste of the sixties. Grandpa Thorley had built the house
at the close of the Civil War, the end of that struggle having found
him--for reasons he was never eager to explain--a far richer man than
its beginning. He had built the house, not on his own old farm, which
was already being absorbed into the suburban portion of the city, but on
a ten-acre plot in County Street, which, with its rich bordering fields,
its overarching elms, and its lofty sites, was revealing itself even
then as the predestined quarter of the wealthy. So long as there had
been no wealthy, County Street had been only a village highway; but the
social developments following on the Civil War had required a Faubourg
St.-Germain.

In this house Miss Louisa Thorley had grown up and been wooed by Archie
Masterman. It had been the wooing of a very plain girl by a good-looking
lad, and had received a shock when Grandpa Thorley suspected other
motives than love to account for the young man's ardor. Her suitor being
forbidden the house, Miss Thorley had no resource but to meet him in the
city on the 7th of March, 1880, and go with him to a convenient
parsonage. Thor was born on the 10th of February of the year following.
Two days later the young mother died.

Grandpa Thorley himself held out for another ten years, when his will
revealed the fact that he had taken every precaution to keep Archie
Masterman from profiting by a penny of the Thorley money. So strict were
the provisions of this document that on the father was thrown the entire
cost of bringing up and educating Louisa Thorley's son.

But Archie Masterman was patient. He took a lease of the Thorley house
when Darling & Darling as executors put it in the market, and paid all
the rent it was worth. Moreover, there had never been a moment in Thor's
life when he had been m