uch the same ancestry as his own, but herself born and
brought up in New York, and of a generation to which the assumption of
prerogative was a natural rather than an acquired characteristic. The
possession of a comfortable degree of fortune and culture was a matter
of course with Ann Winslow, while to poor David Martin education in
the finer things of life, and the opportunity to indulge his taste in
the choice of surroundings and associates, were hard-won privileges.

Both parents had been killed in a railroad accident when Ann, or Nancy
as her mother had insisted on calling her from the day of her
christening, was about seven years old. She had been placed in the
care of a maternal aunt, and had flourished in the heart of a well
ordered establishment of the mid-Victorian type, run by a vigorous,
rather worldly old lady.

From her lovely mother--Ann Winslow had been more than a merely
attractive or pretty woman; she had the real grace and distinction,
and purity of profile that placed her in the actual category of
beauty,--Nancy had inherited a healthy and equitable outlook on life,
while her father, irresistible and impracticable being that he was,
had endowed her with a certain eccentric and adventurous spirit in the
investigation of it.

She had been educated in a boarding-school, forty minutes' run from
New York, and had specialized in the domestic sciences and basket
ball; and on attaining her majority had taken up a course or two at
Columbia, rather more to put off the evil day of assuming the
responsibility of the stuffy, stately old house in Washington Square
than because she ever expected to make any use of her superfluous
education. She was conceded by every one to be her aunt's heir, but
old Miss Winslow died intestate, very suddenly in Nancy's twenty-third
year; and the beneficiaries of this accident, most of them extremely
well-to-do themselves, combined to make Nancy a regular allowance
until she was twenty-five. On her twenty-fifth birthday fifteen
thousand dollars was deposited to her account in the Trust Company
which conserved the family fortunes of the Winslows, and Nancy
understood that they considered their duty by her to be done. It was
with this fifteen thousand dollars that she was to inaugurate her
darling enterprise,--Outside Inn.

Money, as she had truthfully told Billy, meant nothing to her. Her
aunt, living and giving generously, had furnished her with a
background of comfortable, uno