glance around them, that she seemed to be enjoying herself without assistance.

"None too well," said Anne.

She was seated on the sand, under a blueand-white awning, from whose shelter the children of one of her Philadelphia friends had but recently departed with their nurse, and, at her invitation, Slade assumed a halfrecumbent attitude by her side. The awning was over them, and their respective sun-umbrellas, outspread upon the sand, concealed them from loiterers at the bathhouses in the rear. Only the soon deserted beach was left open to their view, and they, likewise, were only to be seen through spyglasses from chance vessels at sea. Anne still struggled with the idea of some explanation; but Slade did not mention her mother or his call upon her, and the superiority of this treatment shortly commended itself to the young girl's sense. The thought which had caused her the next greatest amount of anxiety appeared in her question as to how long he should remain.

"I came for ten days, or thereabouts," he replied; "but my time is subject to extension. I know of nothing just now to call me back. I can't tell."

"And we came for the season," said Anne, "which is liable to contraction. It depends upon many things."

"With me it depends, not upon many things, but upon one thing," he affirmed.

Miss Rittenhouse laughed slightly.

"Then I should think," she said, "that your chances for remaining were even better than ours."

"There is less danger in a number of remote contingencies than in a single probable miscarriage," he observed.

And, as soon as she was able, Anne said she guessed neither of them would go for the present. "Mother threatens to go," she declared, "but I don't know where she would go to. Our house is shut up. Mother isn't fond of strangers, but in the long run she is very reasonable, she is slow and sure. The society here she thinks rather disorganized; -and there isn't much besides the society. Yesterday Madame Connelly was here from New York with a great many new costumes, and we all went over. She liked that." "Did you get a new dress?" he idly inquired.

"I got two, and mother one."

Slade was at that time near the hem of a most exquisite garment, over which some of the sand had scattered. He ventured to brush it off.

"She can't go very well, if she wants to, till father comes," continued the girl. "When will that be?"

"We don't know. He can't tell himself. He waits till there is a moment when he hasn't so much to do, then rushes on at a moment's notice."

"I have great respect for your father," Slade said. "I had heard of him before I met you."

"Very likely," said Anne.

"He holds a good deal of stock in one of the great lines West."

Anne thought this likely, also; but her knowledge of her father's affairs was not so accurate at that instant as a few minutes later, when Slade had enumerated a number of his other excellent investments.

"Everything he touches," he added, "goes

up."

"Then he ought to touch a good many more things," suggested the girl, with which Slade coincided.

"Is your business," she ventured to ask, "the same as father's?"

"I have a variety of interests," he replied. "In that regard, at least, they are alike. You can't expect, however, that they have yet reached the dimensions of your father's affairs."

That was indeed more than she expected. She would rather he had announced himself a professional man, so personal had her preferences regarding him become; but the better she knew him, the more consistent seemed his temperament with the control of a variety of interests, which in her mind meant the owning of a railroad here, and a steam line there, the direction of a bank on the corner, a vague project in South America, and the collection of many rents.

"What did Corbin tell you?" he asked, as if he suspected the real intentness of her question.

And she answered, truthfully enough, though with an appearance of pleasantry: "He told me your name was Mr. Slade." "Thus far our accounts will hang together," he replied, in the same tone. "What else?"

"He said you smoked good cigars." "He didn't leave much out."

"He said you wished to be introduced to

There was something in the mention of Wisconsin, and in this mercantile and enterprising spirit, not wholly in keeping with the apartments she had fitted up for him. Those apartments belonged to a man of leisure and habitual wealth, and it disturbed her a little to find their occupant a person of more restless spirit and precarious fortune. But, unable and unwilling to change him, she slightly modified the rooms to suit him. She removed a few of the books and took down the rarest pictures; she faded the furniture, pushed back the curtains, and here and there upon the red wall she discovered a fleck of plaster. Upon the table, instead of bric-a-brac, she put the New York "Herald" and Leadville "Weekly Chronicle," clippings announcing sheriffs' sales, and files of papers with proper names and large amounts written in pencil across one end. Anne's mind contained few models, but these she varied to suit all known conditions, and with this modified environment she liked Slade none the less.

Even here, however, he did not long remain. It was as if he rose, put on his hat, and deliberately sought more common quarters.

66

I'm on

Slade revolved this assurance for a moment, then told her she was generous for a Philadelphian. Every city was accredited with some weakness, and he was speaking on the basis of a reputation that her birthplace had. He knew nothing about it himself.

"Possibly," he continued, "still more stress is laid upon family connections in the town where I was born. Baltimoreans stick to their relatives, to their old associations, their old houses, old habits, and old morals, even after the rats get into them. You can't very well do more than that."

"We can keep out the rats," she suggested.

"For a time," he granted, "but they will get in. Every family should have a change every few generations. It needs new blood, new impulses, new surroundings;-it needs to take a new direction."

He suggested the prejudices, the inertia, the timidity, the narrowness of view and sympathy which beset families of fortune when once they began taking their ease; and pointed out the advantages of their

He volunteered no further information, and, speaking of the West, she asked if he was related to the Slades of Chicago.

"Not that I know of," he answered, and he smilingly added, "I trust that, for all that, they are very respectable people."

"I don't know them," she replied; "I have only heard of them; but they are more than very respectable. They are said to be quite the best."

"Perhaps I should have attached myself," he continued. "The persistent seeker can generally find a chain to connect him with namesakes who are quite the best. Where did they go from? You will have to help

using their leisure and surplus capital in ways of equal benefit to themselves and those poorer mortals not so far advanced in a worldly way. He touched upon the fatigues of the average person of wealth in search of sensation; the rarity of the person who could profit by leisure and seclusion; the superior pleasure derived from possessions won by one's personal qualities; and the frequent desirability, for progress and happiness, of a desertion of home roofs. It was well, he thought, that blood should be thicker than water, but thickness of blood could be shown in more ways than one, and it did not often happen that ties of relationship were sundered by a little wholesome self-assertion, particularly if followed by success. For his part, he went on to say, he wasn't (as he would like to be) one of those men who could use a sedentary leisure

for high intellectual objects, and he hadn't much of an opinion of those who used it for small and driveling purposes. Under all circumstances, he would personally prefer contact with the crowd, the excitement of business and a life of activity.

It was here that he seemed to escape almost entirely from the rooms in Indian red, and to establish himself in some office,probably in a great, noisy building with belching chimneys and dingy windows, whose interior was wholly unknown to her. His home seemed yet to be made, his curtains to be chosen, the tints of his walls to be selected by a fastidious eye, his furniture to be purchased, his conservatory to be filled, his china to be ordered from original designs, his crystal chandeliers to be lighted, and his hospitality to be tendered to Englishmen like Barney ;-and the thought of these details stirred her as the contemplation of large future transactions stirred her companion.

"Old families," Slade said, "get into ruts, merging the individual in their traditions. They know one set of people, one method of thinking, one set of possibilities. They get drowsy and apathetic,-slaves to their habits; they need new social elements quite as much as new social elements need them."

And little Miss Rittenhouse felt that he was touching with one hand the trials of her own existence, while with the other he remotely pointed out a remedy. She would not be too quick to see it.

"New directions," she observed, "are not so easy to find or follow."

"The difficulty," he declared, "is to find the strength to follow them when they are pointed out."

This was quite the strongest talk that had ever been addressed to her, and it seemed to reach her from a distance, through the lapping of the waves and the confusion in her temples. It was almost too strong for her, producing great vivacity within if not without; and she felt that rising of social excitement to the brain which occasionally transforms even the most prosaic woman into one of lively fancy, if not into that animated and beaming thing known as a coquette. She could almost have exclaimed that she would find the strength if the direction were made clear.

But before she could grasp this speech, a small cannon near the establishment of A. Riggoletti fired a salute to a party approaching from a yacht-partly by way of

|

welcome and partly as a bid for their patronage.

Anne started, the sand falling from her hour-glass, and Slade rose to his feet.

"You haven't bathed," he said, "but suppose we go over to Riggoletti's. We can get a seat there by this time."

Anne rose, too, and looked over to the establishment where complicated beverages helped to preserve the constitutions of the bathers exposed to the chill of the sea. On the veranda, which had been crowded, there appeared a number of vacant tables, and on a small balcony above sat Barney, drinking something in solitary state. Anne had never been among the crowds who had patronized this veranda, though she had occasionally stopped in an anteroom for the purchase of marsh-mallows. Indeed, she had been in the habit of regarding a visit to the region beyond, even for an ice, as an extreme liberty to take with one's sense of discretion. But her sense of discretion seemed to slumber as Slade directed their steps in that direction, holding above them his light umbrella, which she now confused with the canopy of heaven.

As they crossed the intervening sands, he commented briefly upon his friend. "Barney is not feeling first-rate," he said. "Poor fellow, he is a little down."

And, indeed, the appearance of that gentleman on the balcony indicated anything but buoyancy of spirits. His gaze was upon a blank horizon, as he twirled the contents of his glass.

"He is from Swansea, South Wales," Slade went on, "where they are connected with the smelting-works. He has been brought up in the business, I may say, and is a judge of ores. They get their ores from Australia. His father would like to start him over here, and backs him for large amounts; but he has only recently come over-just last year-and hasn't got hold of anything considerable. He was with me out in Wisconsin."

The narrative was interrupted by their entrance to Riggoletti's, where Miss Rittenhouse followed the prepossessing back of her friend past the marsh-mallow counter, through a shady room filled with tables, and out upon the dubious piazza where so much merriment went on.

The young lady whom Anne had before observed as a center of it was again there. surrounded by three or four gentlemen, all of whom were wreathed in smiles, and sat with their bodies variously bent in her direc

tion. They were having the best time in the world. One of the men she called Captain Fithian. That end of the piazza was quite given up to them, and, as Slade passed, they exchanged bows. Anne slightly blushed as the three men looked at her, and fixing her eyes again upon her friend's back, followed him to a table somewhat removed, where he seated her with her back to the party, who soon after left.

A stoutish, blonde young woman, with a long apron, took Slade's order, and was returning with her waiter when Barney also appeared. Slade rose and motioned to him. "I'd like to introduce him," he said. Barney, however, evinced no alacrity in coming forward. He even showed signs of moving off, and allowed his friend to traverse the whole of the dividing distance. Their conversation was not audible, but its length indicated no quick responsiveness on the Englishman's side. Anne looked away, and soon after Slade returned, holding the Englishman by the lapel of his coat.

He was a large, sleek fellow of perhaps twenty-six years. He looked as if none too long since from pasture, and as if the father who backed him for large amounts might be the victim of parental prejudice. He doesn't carry himself well," Slade had said of him; "and his thumbs are turned the wrong way. He doesn't make the most of himself!" His complexion was florid, his step slow, his manner simple, and his expression sincere. He pushed back his hat as he took his seat, and passed his handkerchief across a brow which he endeavored to smooth. Such megrims, however, as had possessed him were not at once dispelled; and, in spite of Slade's efforts, Anne shared in his constraint.

For a few moments she felt a little queer, as she sipped her ice between these two strange gentlemen,-the one large, warm, distrait; the other cool and imperturbable. Before her, in a corner of the piazza, sat a man in a cap, with his chair tipped back against the railing of the lattice. He had an artist's block in his hand, and was sketching some beflounced city children who, with large wooden spoons, were digging wells in the sand, depositing the surplus earth in small wooden buckets. Some ragged indigenous infants were assisting their labors with lively and envious interest, and when the artist moved away, Slade distributed few ten-cent pieces among these little natives, sending them off for buckets and spoons of their own, thus establishing a

| rival well-system in which the industry of the lower classes competed with the efforts of an arrogant aristocracy.

The situation was quite the most Bohemian in which Anne had ever found herself, but when she contemplated her small person surrounded, as it were, by gentlemen, at a place where there was such a dearth of that commodity, the position was not without its charm; and it was not until slight gurgling sounds rose through the straws by whose aid her companions consumed their refreshment, that it finally occurred to her that she must go. The hour for her twoo'clock dinner was found to be pressing, and Slade disappeared to hasten the movements of their attendant, leaving her alone with Barney. As she had predicted, she did not get on with him very well, and reverting to the manners of one newly presented, she asked, somewhat stiffly, if he had spent much time in Baltimore.

On the contrary, he had been there very little. He had been with Slade a good deal in Wisconsin.

"He is connected in some way with some copper-works," said Anne, vaguely.

"Did he tell you that?" said Barney, and he laughed slightly, in what seemed to Anne a meaningless fashion. "Well, so he is," he added, as Slade returned.

"I think I'll drive up," said the girl, when they emerged again in the street, and under the pretext of wishing to shop on her way, she entered alone one of the beach equipages.

The gentlemen returned to the piazza.

IV.

THIS fair day was followed by a prolonged storm. The steady rain-drops roughened the ocean and the pools in the street. The murky atmosphere closed them in on every side, and only now and then revealed the dirty canvas of some chance vessel close to shore. The carriages rolled by with tightly buttoned curtains, drawn by dreary quadrupeds shrouded in rubber cloth. The piazzas were deserted, the few pedestrians who ventured out hid their heads under low umbrellas, and all the gay, cheap panorama which had rolled and unrolled the night and day long by the margin of the sea was folded away in the cheerless hotels.

Anne's eye grew alert and furtive in its search for a glimpse of Slade, and toward the close of the third afternoon, it grew