ot hurry to follow.
His glance moved to the heavy, recumbent figure of his host. He was
looking up across the banisters at Mrs. Weatherbee as she ascended, and
something in his sensuous face, the steady gleam of his round black eyes,
started in Tisdale's mind a sudden suspicion. She stopped to look down
from the gallery railing and smiled with a gay little salute. Then
Elizabeth called, and she disappeared through an open door.

"I'd give fifty dollars to see her face when she gets to that east room,"
Morganstein said abruptly. "But go up, Mr. Tisdale; go up. Needn't bother
to stay with me."

"There's a good deal to see here," Tisdale responded genially. "A man who
is accustomed to spend his time as I do, gathering accurate detail, is
slower than others, I suppose, and this all seems very fine to me."

"It's got to be fine,--the finest bungalow on Puget Sound, I keep telling
the architect. Nothing short of that will do. Listen!" he added in a
smothered voice, "she's in there now."

The vaulted roof carried the echoes down to Tisdale as he went up the
stairs. All the doors were open along the gallery; some were not yet hung,
but he walked directly to the last one from which the exclamations of
surprise had come. And, as he went, he heard Mrs. Weatherbee say: "It was
glorious, like this, the day the idea flashed to my mind; but I did not
dream Mr. Morganstein would alter the casement, for the men were hanging
the French windows. Why, it must have been necessary to change the whole
wall. Still, it was worth it, Marcia, was it not?"

"It certainly is unique," admitted Mrs. Feversham. Then Tisdale stopped on
the threshold, facing a great window of plate glass in a single pane,
designed to frame the incomparable view of Mount Rainier lifting above the
sea. And it was no longer a phantom mountain; the haze had vanished, and
the great peak loomed near, sharply defined, shining in Alpine splendor.

It was a fine conceit, too fine to have sprung from Morganstein's
materialistic brain, and Tisdale was not slow to grasp the truth. The
financier had reconstructed the wall to carry out Mrs. Weatherbee's
suggestion. Then it came over him that this whole building, feature by
feature, had been created to win, to ensnare this woman. It was as though
the wall had become a scroll on which was written: "'All these things will
I give thee, if thou wilt fall down'--and marry me."

Suddenly the place oppressed him. He walked through the