ith Constantine's end of the
game as well as his own--and he did not know how to proceed with the
double responsibility. So Constantine went to Florida alone, to find
his daughter revelling in new frocks and flirtations, both of which
she temporarily sidetracked while she made her father give his consent
to having the house done over after the manner of a Frascati villa.

"Gad," commented her father, during the heat of the argument, "I
thought you were pretty well off as you were. Will Steve like it?"

"He doesn't care what I do," she hastened to assure him. "Of course he
will--he ought to--I'm paying for it. He'll have as wonderful a home
as there is in the United States. Alice's will be a caricature by
contrast. Gay says so. As soon as we go home I'm going to signal them
to begin."

"Well, don't touch my room or I'll burn down the whole plant," her
father warned. "And if I were you I'd tell Steve first--it's only
right."

"But it's my money," she insisted.

"Yes, yes, I know--but you could pretend to consult him. Your mother
and I never bought a toothpick that we hadn't agreed on beforehand."

"Dear old papa." She kissed him graciously by way of dismissal.

So Steve received the letter announcing the plans a few days later. It
was a semi-patronizing, semi-affectionate letter with a great many
underlined words and superlative adjectives and intended to convey the
impression that he was a mighty lucky chap to have married a fairy
princess who would spend her ducats in rigging up an uncomfortable
moth-eaten villa of the days of kingdom come.

As he finished it Gay appeared, having received a letter telling him
to hurry ahead with the plans and contracts. Gay was rather obsequious
in his manner since he did not know whether it was Steve or Beatrice
who was to pay for this transformation.

"If my wife insists, go ahead--but don't move your arts-and-crafts
shop into my office. I'm not enough interested to see designs and so
on. I never had time to be one of the leisure class, and I'm too old
to be kidded into thinking I'm one of them now. But I did make a
mistake," he added, slowly, whether for Gay's benefit or not no one
could tell--"I thought the world owed me more than a living--that it
owed me a bargain. And there never was a bargain cheaply won that
didn't prove a white elephant in time."

Gay's one-cylinder brain did not follow the intricacies of the
statement. He merely thought of Steve in more than usual