d not an unpleasant day to Floyd Grandon. Minton & Co.,
the bankers, greet him quite like an old friend, though they find him
much changed, and are most courteous to Madame Lepelletier; extremely
pleased with so rich and elegant a client, believing they see in her
the future Mrs. Grandon. There is a dinner at a hotel, a little
shopping, and the delightful day is gone. She has had him all to
herself, though now and then he has lapsed into abstraction, but there
is enough with all the perplexing business to render him a trifle
grave.

She is due at Newport next week. She is almost sorry that it is so
soon, but if he _should_ miss her,--and then he has promised a few days
as soon as he can get away. If that tiresome St. Vincent would only die
and be done with it! If he was not mixed up with all these family
affairs,--but they will be settled by midwinter. He is not thinking of
marriage for himself, that she can plainly see, and it makes her cause
all the more secure. She feels, sitting beside him in the palace car,
quite as if she had the sole claim, and she really loves him, needs
him. It is different from any feeling of mere admiration, though he is
a man of whom any woman might be justly proud. She has learned a little
of his own aims to-day: he is to make a literary venture presently that
will give him an undeniable position.

But the child is the Mordecai at the gate. He must go for her, so he
merely picks up the mail that has come and steps back into the
carriage. If she could have dared a little more and gone with him, but
Floyd Grandon is the kind of man with whom liberties are not easily
taken. And perhaps she has won enough for one day. Sometimes in
attempting too much one loses all.

CHAPTER VIII.

For I have given you here a thread of mine own life.--SHAKESPEARE.

Floyd Grandon leans back in the carriage and opens Eugene's letter.

"What idiotic stuff have you in your head? Do you think me a baby in
leading-strings, or a fool? You may work at that invention until the
day of doom, and have fifty experts, and I'll back Wilmarth against you
all. He has been trying it for the last six months, and he's shrewd,
long-headed, something of a genius himself, and he says it never can
succeed, that is, to make money. I am not in the market for matrimonial
speculations, thank you, they are rather too Frenchy and quite too
great a risk where the fortune is not sure. To think of tying one's
self to a little foo