feeling of surprise.

Marcia will not remain to luncheon, though madame invites her
cordially. She is a little late at home, and finds her lord in a rather
unamiable state.

"I wonder what Eugene is about?" he asks, sharply. "There are piles of
letters to go over, and no end of things to straighten up, and Eugene
has not been near the factory this whole morning. He was in only an
hour or two yesterday."

"I saw him out driving with Mrs. Floyd," says Marcia, with a sneer that
is a weak and small edition of her husband's.

A lowering frown crosses Wilmarth's brow, then an expression quite
inscrutable to Marcia,--amusement it looks like, but she knows he is
angry and has a right to be.

"I will go down there this afternoon," she says, with alacrity.

"You will do no such thing. No doubt your brother has engaged Eugene to
entertain his wife in his absence. For business men they are both----"

The servant comes in and the sentence is unfinished. But Jasper
Wilmarth is thinking that no doubt the handsome young man is very
pleasing to Mrs. Floyd Grandon, and if the husband should wake up some
day on the verge of a scandal, why, it will be one of those rare
strokes of accidental, otherwise poetic justice.

Marcia _does_ go "home," as they still call the place. Eugene is not
about and Mrs. Latimer is spending the afternoon in an old-fashioned
way with a nurse and two children. Marcia's fine moral sense is shocked
at the duplicity of Mrs. Floyd, and she announces the fact to her
husband at dinner, to which he replies with an uncomfortable laugh.

Eugene brings Violet a letter on his return, and her face is illumined
with eager joy. She cannot wait to retire becomingly to her own room,
but breaks the seal on the porch, and is deep in its contents.

"Oh!" she cries at first, in disappointment.

"Floyd has gone on to Chicago," announces Eugene. "Wilmarth turned
black as a thunder-cloud over the news. He scents treason, stratagems,
and conspiracies."

Violet looks up in curious amaze. "Mr. Grandon will never do
anything--that is _not_ right," she adds, after a moment.

Eugene shrugs his shoulders. "What may be right enough for him might
hit Wilmarth hard," says the young man, and the tone implies that he
would rather enjoy the hard hitting.

Violet hardly hears that. She colors delicately over the remainder of
the letter, which is not long, but touches her inexpressibly. He misses
her amid all this haste and turmoil