been made. I know the type. It's awful--especially in the form of
the American man of business."

"I'm an American man of business myself."

"Yes; by misadventure. You're the business man made, but not born. By
nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman.' I
admire you more than I can say--everybody admires you--for making such a
success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least."

The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune. Two or
three beginnings presented themselves, and as he hesitated, choosing
between them, he moistened his lips and wiped the cold perspiration
from his brow. After all, the blessed apathy within him was giving way
and going to play him false! He had a minute of feeling as the condemned
man must feel when he catches sight of the guillotine.

Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another
step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister
and looking over. He noticed--by a common trick of the perceptive powers
at crises of anguish--how the slender white pilasters, carved and
twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory
Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black
gown.

"It's really true--what I say about business, papa," she pursued. "I'm
very much in earnest, and so is Rupert. I do wish you'd think of that
place near Heneage. It will be so lovely for me to feel you're there;
and there can't be any reason for your going on working any longer."

"No; there's no reason for that," he managed to say.

"Well then?" she demanded, with an air of triumph. "It's just as I said.
You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above
all, to give up. It might have been better if you'd done it long ago."

"I couldn't," he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a
cry. "I tried to, ... but things were so involved ... almost from the
first...."

"Well, as long as they're not involved now there's no reason why it
shouldn't be better late than never."

"But they _are_ involved now," he said, with an intensity so poignant
that he was surprised she didn't notice it.

"Then straighten them out. Isn't that what we've been saying all along,
Cousin Rodney and I? Take a partner; take two partners. Cousin Rodney
says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before--"

"I couldn't.... Things weren't shipshape enough