The towel, pinned around her
hair like a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like appearance to her still
lovely face.

"Well?" she demanded. "Go out for a minute, Castle."

Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.

"I have spoken to Ellen," she said, her voice cautious. "A young man who
does not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy. What is that,
Mrs. Cardew?"

"It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle. Her grandfather--"

"But not handsome," insisted Mademoiselle, "and lame! Also, I know the
child. She is not in love. When that comes to her we shall know it."

Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.

"She is changed, isn't she, Mademoiselle?"

Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.

"A phase," she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded
any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition
that would pass. "A phase, only. Now that she is back among familiar
things, she will become again a daughter of the house."

"Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her--"

"She 'as had liberty," said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an
aspirate. "It is like wine to the young. It intoxicates. But it, too,
passes. In my country--"

But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of
Mademoiselle's country. She settled herself on her pillows.

"Call Castle, please," she said. "And--do warn her not to voice those
ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country pharmacy, you say?"

"And lame, and not fond of women," corroborated Mademoiselle. "Ca ne
pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?"

CHAPTER II

Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spent
a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital.
That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron business
had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was
still in its infancy.

Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a monthly
pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the future of
iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But "sixty-five" saw the first
steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream. He
went to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the first
successful Bessemer converter. When he started east again he knew what
he was to make his life work.

He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding
faith in the new industr