341
CHAPTER TWELVE 350
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 354
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 368

PART ONE

"Love is enough: ho ye who seek saving,
Go no further: come hither: there have been who have found it,
And these know the House of Fulfilment of craving;
These know the Cup with the roses around it;
These know the World's Wound and the balm that hath bound it."
WILLIAM MORRIS.

--"Elements, breeds, adjustments ...
A new race dominating previous ones."
WALT WHITMAN.

CHAPTER ONE

Harriet Blair was seventeen when she went with her father and mother
and her brother Austen to New Orleans, to the marriage of an older
brother, Alexander, the father's business representative at that
place. It was characteristic of the Blairs that they declined the
hospitality of the bride's family, and from the hotel attended,
punctiliously and formally, the occasions for which they had come. It
takes ease to accept hospitality.

Alexander Blair, the father, banker and capitalist, of Vermont stock,
now the richest man in Louisville, was of a stern ruggedness
unsoftened by a long and successful career in the South, while his
wife, the daughter of a Scotch schoolmaster settled in Pennsylvania,
was the possessor of a thrifty closeness and strong, practical sense.

Alexander, their oldest son, a man of thirty, to whose wedding they
had come, was what was natural to expect, a literal, shrewd man, with
a strong sense of duty as he saw it. His long, clean-shaven upper lip,
above a beard, looked slightly grim, and his straight-gazing,
blue-grey eyes were stern.

The second son, Austen, was clean-featured, handsome and blond, but he
was also, by report, the shrewd and promising son of his father, even
as his brother was reported before him.

Harriet, the daughter, was a silent, cold-looking girl, who wrapped
herself in reserve as a cover for self-consciousness but, observing
closely, thought to her own conclusions. She had a disillusioning way
of baring facts in these communings, which showed life to her very
honestly but without romance or glamour.

At the wedding, sitting in her white dress by her father and mother in
the flower-bedecked parlours of the Randolphs, Harriet looked at her
brother, standing by the girl of seventeen whom he had just married,
and saw things much as they w