lvet cloak, showing a splendor
of white and silver. "Anything better at Nice next winter, do you
think?" She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again.
"Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it over."

"You can do anything, Mary."

There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more--a
significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if
he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same
breath.

And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted
her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he
should feel the reassurance of its pressure.

"Don't worry," she said, in a low voice and gravely. "I know exactly
what you want me to do."

CHAPTER VI

It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there
was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room,
and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to
converse--necessarily at the tops of their voices. The whole company
of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the occasion by
carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation, it seemed
a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of crystal and
silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and
white roses--an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three
marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end,
white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing.
They were models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan
Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the
guests recognized them without having to be told what they were, and
pronounced the likenesses superb.

The arrangement of the table was visibly baronial. At the head sat the
great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him;
then on each side came the neighbors of the "old" house, grading down to
vassals and retainers--superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments,
and the like--at the foot, where the Thane's lady took her place as a
consolation for the less important. Here, too, among the thralls and
bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could
look at him and eat.

Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were
wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended
for introduction into the system b