out all this travel and hurrying from place to place, but it
gave Margaret a sense of varied and large occupations that she did not
understand. Through it all there was the personality that had been
recently so much in her thoughts. He was coming. That was a very solid
fact that she must meet. And she did not doubt that he was coming to see
her, and soon. That was a definite and very different idea from the dim
belief that he would come some time. He had signed himself hers
"faithfully."

It was a letter that could not be answered like the other one; for it
raised questions and prospects, and the thousand doubts that make one
hesitate in any definite step; and, besides, she pleased herself to think
that she did not know her own mind. He had not asked if he might come; he
had said he was coming, and really there was no answer to that. Therefore
she put it out of her mind-another curious mental process we have in
dealing with a matter that is all the time the substratum of our
existence. And she was actually serious; if she was reflective, she was
conscious of being judicially reflective.

But in this period of calm and reflection it was impossible that a woman
of Margaret's habits and temperament should not attempt to settle in her
mind what that life was yonder of which she had a little taste; what was
the career that Henderson had marked out for himself; what were his
principles; what were the methods and reasons of his evident success.
Endeavoring in her clear mind to separate the person, about whose
personality she was so fondly foolish, from his schemes, which she so
dimly comprehended, and applying to his somewhat hazy occupations her
simple moral test, were the schemes quite legitimate? Perhaps she did not
go so far as this; but what she read in the newspapers of moneymaking in
these days made her secretly uneasy, and she found herself wishing that
he were definitely practicing some profession, or engaged in some one
solid occupation.

In the little parliament at our house, where everything, first and last,
was overhauled and brought to judgment, without, it must be confessed,
any visible effect on anything, one evening a common "incident" of the
day started the conversation. It was an admiring account in a newspaper
of a brilliant operation by which three or four men had suddenly become
millionaires.

"I don't see," said my wife, "any mention in this account of the
thousands who have been reduced to poverty b