s being
spoken.

Dinner was announced, and they went into the great dining-room, where
the table with its linen, silver, and china gleamed under shaded
lights. The oldest and most dignified of the three men servants who
waited upon them in the dining-room Alan thought must be a butler--a
species of creature of whom Alan had heard but never had seen; the
other servants, at least, received and handed things through him, and
took their orders from him. As the silent-footed servants moved about,
and Alan kept up a somewhat strained conversation with Mrs. Sherrill--a
conversation in which no reference to his own affairs was yet made--he
wondered whether Constance and her mother always dressed for dinner in
full evening dress as now, or whether they were going out. A word from
Constance to her mother told him this latter was the case, and while it
did not give complete answer to his internal query, it showed him his
first glimpse of social engagements as a part of the business of life.
In spite of the fact that Benjamin Corvet, Sherrill's close friend, had
disappeared--or perhaps because he had disappeared and, as yet, it was
not publicly known--their and Sherrill's engagements had to be
fulfilled.

What Sherrill had told Alan of his father had been iterating itself
again and again in Alan's thoughts; now he recalled that Sherrill had
said that his daughter believed that Corvet's disappearance had had
something to do with her. Alan had wondered at the moment how that
could be; and as he watched her across the table and now and then
exchanged a comment with her, it puzzled him still more. He had
opportunity to ask her when she waited with him in the library, after
dinner was finished and her mother had gone up-stairs; but he did not
see then how to go about it.

"I'm sorry," she said to him, "that we can't be home to-night; but
perhaps you would rather be alone?"

He did not answer that.

"Have you a picture here, Miss Sherrill, of--my father?" he asked.

"Uncle Benny had had very few pictures taken; but there is one here."

She went into the study, and came back with a book open at a half-tone
picture of Benjamin Corvet. Alan took it from her and carried it
quickly closer to the light. The face that looked up to him from the
heavily glazed page was regular of feature, handsome in a way, and
forceful. There were imagination and vigor of thought in the broad,
smooth forehead; the eyes were strangely moody and b