ce Ferrall slowly, "if that is the way you feel, I don't
see why you shouldn't play with Mr. Siward whenever you like."

"Nor I. I've been a perfect fool not to. ... Howard hates him."

"How do you know?"

"What a question! A woman knows such things. Then, you remember that
caricature--so dreadfully like Howard? Howard has no sense of humour;
he detests such things. It was the most dreadful thing that Mr. Siward
could have done to him."

"Meddled again!" groaned Grace. "Doesn't Howard know that I did that?"

"Yes, but nothing I can say alters his conviction that the likeness was
intended. You know it was a likeness! And if Mr. Siward had not told
me that it was not intended, I should never have believed it to be an
accident."

After a prolonged silence Sylvia said, overcarelessly: "I don't quite
understand Howard. With me anger lasts but a moment, and then I'm open
to overtures for peace ... I think Howard's anger lasts."

"It does," said Grace. "He was a muff as a boy--a prig with a prig's
memory under all his shallow, showy surface. I'm frank with you; I never
could take my cousin either respectfully or seriously, but I've known
him to take his own anger so seriously that years after he has visited
it upon those who had really wronged him. And he is equipped for
retaliation if he chooses. That fortune of his reaches far. ... Not that
I think him capable of using such a power to satisfy a mere personal
dislike. Howard has principles, loads of them. But--the weapon is
there."

"Is it true that Mr. Siward is interested in building electric roads?"
asked Sylvia curiously.

"I don't know, child. Why?"

"Nothing. I wondered."

"Why?"

"Mr. Mortimer said so."

"Then I suppose he is. I'll ask Kemp if you like. Why? Isn't it all
right to build them?"

"I suppose so. Howard is in it somehow. In fact Howard's company is
behind Mr. Siward's, I believe."

Grace Ferrall turned and looked at the girl beside her, laughing
outright.

"Oh, Howard doesn't do mysterious financial things to nice young men
because they draw impudent pictures of him running after his dog--or
for any other reason. That, dear, is one of those skilfully developed
portions of an artistic plot; and plots exist only in romance. So do
villains; and besides, my cousin isn't one. Besides that, if Howard is
in that thing, no doubt Kemp and I are too. So your nice young man is in
very safe company."

"You draw such silly inferences," said Sylvi