ta and marble took the
place of the old ornaments of which the young town had been so proud.
The thread of wires and pipes that made the web of the spider behind the
brass sign, multiplied and the pipes and the rails and the cables that
carried his power grew taut and strong. New people by thousands had come
into the town and gradually the big house, the Temple of Love on Hill
Crest, that had been deserted during the first years of its occupancy,
filled up. Judge Thomas Van Dorn and his handsome wife were seen in the
great hotels of New York and Boston, and in Europe more or less, though
the acquaintances they made in Europe and in the East were no longer
needed to fill their home. But the old settlers of Harvey maintained
their siege. It was at a Twelfth Night festivity when young people from
all over the Valley and from all over the West were masqueing in the
great house, that Judge Van Dorn, to please a pretty girl from Baltimore
whom the Van Dorns had met in Italy, shaved his mustache and appeared
before the guests with a naked lip. The pursed, shrunken, sensuous lips
of the cruel mouth showed him so mercilessly that Mrs. Van Dorn could
not keep back a little scream of horror the first time he stood before
her with his shaved lip. But she changed her scream to a baby giggle,
and he did not know how he was revealed. So he went about ever after,
preening himself that his smooth face gave him youth, and strutting
inordinately because some of the women he knew told him he looked like a
boy of twenty-five--instead of a man in his forties. He was always
suave, always creakingly debonaire, always, even in his meannesses,
punctilious and airy.

So the old settlers sometimes were fooled by his attitude toward
Margaret, his wife. He bore toward her in public that shallow polish of
attention, which puzzled those who knew that they were never together by
themselves when he could help it, that he spent his evenings at the City
Club, and that often at the theater they sat almost back to back
unconsciously during the whole performance. But after the curtain was
down, the polite husband was the soul of attendance upon the beautiful
wife--her coat, her opera glasses, her trappings of various sorts flew
in and out of his eager hands as though he were a conjurer playing with
them for an audience. For he was a proud man, and she was a vain woman,
and they were striving to prove to a disapproving world that the bargain
they had made was