. The plans for
their new house were being drawn by a well-known eastern architect, and
they were merely waiting before building until Mr. Kemp should find
himself sufficiently prosperous to maintain the sort of house that the
architect had designed for a rising young western banker.

"Oh, dear," Milly sighed, "you will be moving soon--and there'll be
nobody left around here for me to know."

Eleanor Kemp smiled.

"You know what I mean!... People like you and your mother."

"You may not live here always," her friend prophesied.

"I hope not. But papa seems perfectly content--he's taken a five years'
lease of that horrid house. I just knew it wasn't the right place as
soon as I saw it!"

The older woman laughed at Milly's despair.

"There's time yet for something to happen."

Milly blushed happily. There was only one sort of something to happen
for her,--the right sort of marriage. Milly, as Mrs. Kemp confided to
her husband, was a girl with a "future," and that future could be only a
matrimonial one. Her new friend good naturedly did what she could for
Milly by putting her in the way of meeting people. At her own house and
her mother's, across the street, Milly saw a number of people who came
into her life helpfully later on. General Claxton was still at that time
a considerable political figure in the middle west, had been congressman
and was spoken of for Senator. Jolly, plump Mrs. Claxton maintained a
large, informal hospitality of the Virginia sort, and to the big brick
house came all kinds of people,--southerners with quaint accents and
formal manners, young Englishmen on their way to the wild northwest,
down-state politicians, as well as the merchant aristocracy of the city.
Thus Milly as a mere girl had her first opportunity of peeping at the
larger world in the homely, high-studded rooms and on the generous
porches of the Claxton house, and enjoyed it immensely.

The church had thus far done a good deal for Milly.

For some time it remained the staple of her social existence,--that
sallow, cream-colored pile, in which the congregation had already so
shrunken by removals that the worshippers rattled around in the big
building like dried peas in a pod. Milly became a member of the pastor's
Bible class and an ardent worker in the Young Women's Guild. She was
looked upon favorably as a right-minded and religious young woman. She
had joined the church some years before, shortly after the death of her
moth