enty years of your life ought not to be
profoundly disagreeable. Now I dislike to be a nuisance myself, but in
view of the war, it is necessary that there should be another Paliser,
if not here, at least en route."

"I will think it over," said this charming young man, who had no
intention of doing anything of the kind.

"The quicker the better then, and while you are at it select a girl with
good health and no brains. They wear best. I did think of Margaret
Austen for you, but she has become engaged. Lennox his name is. Her
mother told me. Told me too she hated it. Said you must come to dinner
and she'd have a girl or two for you to look at. Oblige me by going.
Plenty of others though. Girls here are getting healthier and stupider
and uglier every year. By Gad, sir, I remember----"

The old man rambled on. He was back in the days when social New York
foamed with beauty, when it held more loveliness to the square inch than
any other spot on earth. He was back in the days when Fifth Avenue was
an avenue and not a ghetto.

With an air of interest the young man listened. The air was not feigned.
Yet what interested him was not the outworn tale but the pathological
fact that the reminiscences of the aged are symptomatic of hardening of
the arteries.

Mentally he weighed his father, gave him a year, eighteen months, and
that, not because he was anxious for his shoes, but out of sheer
dilettantism.

The idea that his father would survive him, that it was he who was
doomed, that already behind the curtains of life destiny was staging his
death--and what a death!--he could no more foresee than he foresaw the
Paliser Case, which, to the parties subsequently involved, was then
unimaginable, yet which, at that very hour, a court of last resort was
deciding.

He looked over at his father. "Palmerston asked everybody, particularly
when he didn't know them from Adam, 'How's the old complaint?' How is
yours?"

With that air that had won so many hearts, and broken them too, the old
man smiled.

"When I don't eat anything and sit perfectly still, it is extraordinary
how well I feel."

How he felt otherwise, he omitted to state. A gentleman never talks of
disagreeable matters.

II

In the shouted extras that succeeded the initial news of the murder,
Margaret Austen was mentioned, not as the criminal, no one less criminal
than the girl could be imagined, but as being associated with the
parties involved.

That