anionship--she
had taught him through her own delightful personality, and her death
left him desperately lonely. His loneliness made him, as one of his
friends had said, extremely open to the dangers of matrimony, while on
the other hand he had been rendered highly fastidious by his years of
happy intimacy with his mother. Her wit and good temper he might have
found in another woman--even possibly her concentrated interest in
himself--but her fortunate sense of proportion, her knowledge in
every-day life, as to what was trivial and what was essential, he found
strangely lacking in all his other friends.

He thought now how amusing she would have been about the manicured maid
servants, and how, if he and she had been breakfasting together, they
would have amused themselves by inventing fantastic explanations,
instead of quarreling and sulking at each other as he and Tucker had
done.

Tucker had been his father's lawyer. It had been one of the many
contradictions in Mrs. Crane's character that, though she had always
insisted that as a matter of loyalty to her husband Tucker should be
retained as family adviser, she had never been able to conceal from
Burton, even when he was still a boy, that she considered the lawyer an
intensely comic character.

She used to contrive to throw a world of significance into her
pronunciation of his name, "Solon." Crane could still hear her saying
it, as if she were indeed addressing the original lawgiver; and it was
largely because this recollection was too vivid that he himself had
taken to calling his counselor by his last name.

He sighed as he thought of all this; but he was a young man, the day was
fine and his horses an absorbing interest, and so he spent a very happy
morning, passing his hand along doubtful fetlocks and withers, and
consulting with his head man on all the infinity of detail which
constitutes the chief joy of so many sports.

At lunch, he appeared to be interested in nothing but the selection of
the best mount for Miss Falkener--a state of mind which Tucker
considered a great deal more suitable than his former frivolous interest
in cats. And soon after lunch was over he went off for a ride, so as to
get it in before he had to go and meet his new guests.

A back piazza ran past the dining-room windows. It was shady and
contained a long wicker-chair. The November afternoon was warm, and here
Tucker decided to rest, possibly to sleep, in order to recuperate from