rl Usher's, she gazed into the
large, lighted window of the automobile as she might have gazed
through a powerful telescope at a scene of family life on Mars.

There were two girls in evening dress and two young men in the
illuminated chariot. It flashed by like a Leonid, but left a gay
impression of flower-tinted velvet cloaks and ermine and waved hair
with a glitter of diamonds and oval white shirtfronts and black coats.
Also a pair of eyes seemed to look for the twentieth part of a second
into Winifred's.

"I don't believe it was he!" she said to herself when the motor had
gone by.

CHAPTER XII

BLUE PETER

Peter Rolls, Sr., and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly
different ways. One difference was that Peter junior knew he was
unhappy and suspected why. Peter senior had no idea that what he
suffered from was unhappiness. He thought that it was indigestion, and
he supposed that feeling as he felt was the normal state of men
passing beyond middle age. When you were growing old you could not
expect to keep much zest or personal interest in life or to enjoy
things, so he had always been told; and dully, resignedly, he believed
what "they" said.

If any one had told him that he was a miserable man he would have been
angry, and also surprised. Why the dickens should he be miserable? He
considered himself one of the most successful men in New York, and his
greatest pleasure was in recalling his successes, step by step, from
the time before he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder all
the way up to the top.

Often he lay awake at night pondering on those first days and first
ambitions. If he began to think of them when he went to bed it was
fatal. He became so pleasantly excited, and the past built itself up
so realistically all about him, that he could not go to sleep for
hours. What a sensational "bed book" is to some tired brains, that
was his past to the head of the Hands. Besides, he had everything in
the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly
want. Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you
wanted not to know what to want. But, he consoled himself, that must
be so with all rich people. The best thing was not to think about it.

He was convinced that he loved mother as dearly as ever a husband had
loved a wife. They were uncomfortable together, but wretched apart.
That was marriage. There was nothing more in it.

They hadn't much to say to ea