sked Joseph.

"I am going home," answered Ammiel, "to my mother's and my father's
house in Galilee."

"Go in peace, friend," said Joseph.

And the sad shepherd took up his battered staff, and went on his way
rejoicing.

THE MANSION

I

There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman
mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently
applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for
residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an
expression of complacency and half-disdain.

The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight front
of chocolate-coloured stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring
windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors
at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the
imagination. But it was eminently respectable, and in its way
imposing. It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewellers,
the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers,
the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail
traders in the luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house
that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally
and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius' Church.

At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory
in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing
neighbourhood. It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the
tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the
land on which it stood.

John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself
thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were
incrusted. He was a self-made man. But in making himself he had chosen
a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules.
There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him. He
was solid, correct, and justly successful.

His minor tastes, of course, had been carefully kept up to date. At
the proper time, pictures by the Barbizon masters, old English plate
and portraits, bronzes by Barye and marbles by Rodin, Persian carpets
and Chinese porcelains, had been introduced to the mansion. It
contained a Louis Quinze reception-room, an Empire drawing-room, a
Jacobean dining-room, and various apartments dimly reminiscent of the
styles of furniture affected by deceased monarchs. That the hallways
were too