. Howard's relationship, which would now die with Colonel Pendleton
and himself; and there was no danger of any emotional betrayal of it in
the cold official administration of a man who had received the Trust
through the formal hands of successive predecessors. He had forgotten
the time limited for the guardianship, but the girl must soon be of age
and off their hands. If there had ever been any romantic or chivalrous
impression left upon his memory by the scene in the mayor's office, I
fear he had put it away with various other foolish illusions of his
youth, to which he now believed he was superior.

Nevertheless, he would see the colonel, and at once, and settle the
question. He looked at the address, "St. Charles Hotel." He
remembered an old hostelry of that name, near the Plaza. Could it be
possible that it had survived the alterations and improvements of the
city? It was an easy walk through remembered streets, yet with changed
shops and houses and faces. When he reached the Plaza, scarce
recognizable in its later frontages of brick and stone, he found the
old wooden building still intact, with its villa-like galleries and
verandas incongruously and ostentatiously overlooked by two new and
aspiring erections on either side. For an instant he tried to recall
the glamour of old days. He remembered when his boyish eyes regarded
it as the crowning work of opulence and distinction; he remembered a
ball given there on some public occasion, which was to him the acme of
social brilliancy and display. How tawdry and trivial it looked beside
those later and more solid structures! How inconsistent were those
long latticed verandas and balconies, pathetic record of that first
illusion of the pioneers that their climate was a tropical one! A
restaurant and billiard-saloon had aggrandized all of the lower story;
but there was still the fanlight, over which the remembered title of
"St. Charles," in gilded letters, was now reinforced by the too
demonstrative legend, "Apartments and Board, by the Day or Week." Was
it possible that this narrow, creaking staircase had once seemed to him
the broad steps of Fame and Fortune? On the first landing, a
preoccupied Irish servant-girl, with a mop, directed him to a door at
the end of the passage, at which he knocked. The door was opened by a
grizzled negro servant, who was still holding a piece of oily
chamois-leather in his hand; and the contents of a dueling-case,
scattered u