ut Howard never had a son.

CHAPTER III

All through her teens Lily had wondered about the mystery concerning her
Aunt Elinor. There was an oil portrait of her in the library, and one of
the first things she had been taught was not to speak of it.

Now and then, at intervals of years, Aunt Elinor came back. Her mother
and father would look worried, and Aunt Elinor herself would stay in her
rooms, and seldom appeared at meals. Never at dinner. As a child Lily
used to think she had two Aunt Elinors, one the young girl in the gilt
frame, and the other the quiet, soft-voiced person who slipped around
the upper corridors like a ghost.

But she was not to speak of either of them to her grandfather.

Lily was not born in the house on lower East Avenue.

In the late eighties Anthony built himself a home, not on the farm, but
in a new residence portion of the city. The old common, grazing ground
of family cows, dump and general eye-sore, had become a park by that
time, still only a potentially beautiful thing, with the trees that were
to be its later glory only thin young shoots, and on the streets that
faced it the wealthy of the city built their homes, brick houses of
square solidity, flush with brick pavements, which were carefully
reddened on Saturday mornings. Beyond the pavements were cobble-stoned
streets. Anthony Cardew was the first man in the city to have a
rubber-tired carriage. The story of Anthony Cardew's new home is the
story of Elinor's tragedy. Nor did it stop there. It carried on to the
third generation, to Lily Cardew, and in the end it involved the city
itself. Because of the ruin of one small home all homes were threatened.
One small house, and one undying hatred.

Yet the matter was small in itself. An Irishman named Doyle owned the
site Anthony coveted. After years of struggle his small grocery had
begun to put him on his feet, and now the new development of the
neighborhood added to his prosperity. He was a dried-up, sentimental
little man, with two loves, his wife's memory and his wife's garden,
which he still tended religiously between customers; and one ambition,
his son. With the change from common to park, and the improvement in the
neighborhood, he began to flourish, and he, too, like Anthony, dreamed
a dream. He would make his son a gentleman, and he would get a shop
assistant and a horse and wagon. Poverty was still his lot, but there
were good times coming. He saved carefully, and se