dvent
of this personage become so real a thing that she bounded when the gate
slammed--to find that it was only Peter.

It was preposterous, of course, that Peter should be a prince in
disguise. Peter who, despite her efforts to teach him distinction in
dress, insisted upon wearing the same kind of clothes. A mild kind of
providence, Peter, whose modest functions were not unlike those of the
third horse which used to be hitched on to the street car at the foot
of the Seventeenth-Street hill: it was Peter's task to help pull Honora
through the interminable summers. Uhrig's Cave was an old story now:
mysteries were no longer to be expected in St. Louis. There was a great
panorama--or something to that effect--in the wilderness at the end of
one of the new electric lines, where they sometimes went to behold the
White Squadron of the new United States Navy engaged in battle with
mimic forts on a mimic sea, on the very site where the country place
of Madame Clement had been. The mimic sea, surrounded by wooden stands
filled with common people eating peanuts and popcorn, was none other
than Madame Clement's pond, which Honora remembered as a spot of
enchantment. And they went out in the open cars with these same people,
who stared at Honora as though she had got in by mistake, but always
politely gave her a seat. And Peter thanked them. Sometimes he fell into
conversations with them, and it was noticeable that they nearly
always shook hands with him at parting. Honora did not approve of this
familiarity.

"But they may be clients some day," he argued--a frivolous answer to
which she never deigned to reply.

Just as one used to take for granted that third horse which pulled the
car uphill, so Peter was taken for granted. He might have been on the
highroad to a renown like that of Chief Justice Marshall, and Honora had
been none the wiser.

"Well, Peter," said Uncle Tom at dinner one evening of that memorable
summer, when Aunt Mary was helping the blackberries, and incidentally
deploring that she did not live in the country, because of the cream one
got there, "I saw Judge Brice in the bank to-day, and he tells me you
covered yourself with glory in that iron foundry suit."

"The Judge must have his little joke, Mr. Leffingwell," replied Peter,
but he reddened nevertheless.

Honora thought winning an iron foundry suit a strange way to cover one's
self with glory. It was not, at any rate, her idea of glory. What were
lawy