for granted, and he made no excuse
at all. But if Ena had known the mystery of those late evenings she
would have been struck with fear--the fear which comes of finding out
that those we think we know best are strangers to us.

Of all the sad millionaires of New York who pin together the pages of
certain mysterious life chapters not to be read by eyes at home,
perhaps no other had a mystery like that of Peter Rolls. It was now
the one thing that he intensely enjoyed; but it was a guilty, furtive
enjoyment which made a nervous wreck of him and ruined a stomach once
capable of salvation.

Peter junior had never been entirely happy since he left Yale at
twenty-three. It was only then that he began to look life in the face
and see the freckles on its complexion The minute he saw them on that
countenance which should be so beautiful, he wanted to help in some
way to rub them off. To help--to help! That was the great thing.

He didn't care much for business, but he felt that, being Peter
Rolls's only son, it was his duty to care. He imagined father deeply
hurt at the indifference of his two children to that which had been
his life--hurt, but hiding the wound with proud reserve. So Peter
junior determined to sacrifice himself. He offered to go into the
shop, to begin at the bottom if father wished, and in learning all
there was to learn, gradually work up to a place where he could be a
staff to lean upon.

It was in the "library" that they had this talk--an immense and
appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets
of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates,
bleakly glittering behind glass doors. Peter senior tried to kill time
there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background
for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother's poor old
furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his
heart between walls that smelled of money and newness. However, he did
his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in
his father's eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass
doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all
wrong.

"So you don't trust your own father?" was the answer he got when he
stopped, as one might be stopped short by the sharp edge of a marble
mantelpiece when trying to find the way across a dark room.

"Don't--trust you?" stammered Peter, sure now that he was a fool not
to un