problem quite simply for herself. A little procession of vehicles,
townward bound, had gathered on the bridge, waiting until the closing of

the draw should allow them to continue upon their way. From these most of
the occupants had descended, and were staring with avidity at us all; the

great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and
fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched

beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the
boldest had touched him, and found no outwardinjury upon him; and this

had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La
Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said to

him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart, and
General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old

driver.
"No," she said to John Mayrant, "certainly not."

I wondered at the needlessseverity with which she declined his offer to
accompany her and help her.

He stood by the wheel of the cart, looking up at her and protesting, and
I joined him.

"Thank you," she returned, "I need no one. You will both oblige me by
saying no more about it."

"John!" It was the slow, well-calculated utterance of Hortense Rieppe.
Did I hear in it the caressing note of love?

John turned.
The draw had swung to, the mast and sail of the vessel were separating

away from the bridge with a stealthy motion, men with iron bars were at
work fastening the draw secure, and horses' hoofs knocked nervously upon

the wooden flooring as the internal churning of the automobiles burst
upon their innocent ears.

"John, if Mr. Rodgers is really not going with us--"
Thus Hortense; and at that Miss La Heu:--

"Why do you keep them waiting?" There was no caress in that note! It was
polished granite.

He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro,
and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled fiancee,

among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the automobiles,
horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines were gone with

their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind them--quite as our
present epoch will leave behind it--a trail of power, of ingenuity, of

ruthlessness, and a bad smell.
"Hold hard, old boy!" chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this

sentiment. "How do you know the stink of one generation does not become
the perfume of the next?" Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing at all

(which was seldom--for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh
perpetually turned out to grass--or rather to grass widows) always put it

well, and with a bracing vocabulary. "Hullo!" he now exclaimed, and
walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol.

"Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken
however." And then he hailed me by a name of our youth." What are you

doing down here, you old sourbelly?"
"Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich."

"Oh, shucks, old man, they're not so yellow!"
"Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold."

"Charley's not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit here
and there--just now, for instance, when he didn't see that that girl

wouldn't think of riding in the machine that had just killed her dog. By
Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she'd do! Who was the

young fire-eater?"
"Fire-eater! He's a lot more decent than you or I."

"But that's saying so little, dear boy!"
"Seriously, Beverly."

"Oh, hang it with your 'seriously'! Well, then, seriously, melodrama was
the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we've outgrown it; it's

devilish demode to chuck things in people's faces.
"I'm not sorry John Mayrant did it!" I brought out his name with due

emphasis.
"All the same," Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned

rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol.
Charley descended to get it--an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by

the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.
He made his thanks marked. "It is my sister's," he concluded, to me, by

way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. "It is not much, but
it has got some stones and things in the handle."

We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from
Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.

"You've got a Frenchman along," I said.
"Little Gazza," Beverly returned. "Italian; though from his morals you'd

never guess he wasn't Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right to
do something in the presence of the Pope--or not to do it, I forget

which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of
old furniture--Renaissance--Lorenzo du Borgia--that sort of jolly old

truck--to Bohm, you know.
I didn't know.

"Oh, yes, you do, old boy. Harry Bohm, of Bohm & Cohn. Everybody knows
Bohm, and we'll all be knowing Cohn by next year. Gazza has sold him a

lot of furniture, too. Bohm's from Pittsfield, or South Lee, or East
Canaan, or West Stockbridge, or some of those other back-country cider

presses that squirt some of the hardest propositions into Wall Street.
He's just back from buying a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico.

Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the
military attache to Jerusalem. He's the big chap that sat behind me in

the car. He'll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm's a
jolly old sort--and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you're letting this

Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? Yellow rich isn't half
bad, and I'll say it myself, and pretend it's mine; but hang it, old man,

their children won't be worse than lemon-colored, and the grandchildren
will be white!"

"Just in time," I exclaimed, "to take a back seat with their evaporated
fortunes!"

Beverly chuckled. "Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones.
Now don't walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I'm no Puritan, and my

people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I'm
holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish to

hold on nowadays, you can't be drawing lines! If you don't want to see
yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers. Our

blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless replacing
yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers! That's where

Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows sense."
I turned square on him. "Then she has broken it?"

"Broken what?"
"Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn't--?"

"See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?"
I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers. Of

course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need of
announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had

fallen into the habit of postponing.
But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. "I suppose you must

have some reason for your remark," he said.
"You don't mean that you're engaged to her?" I shot out.

"Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy! Oh,
no, we're merely playing at it, she and I. She's a good player. But

Charley--"
"He is?" I shouted.

"I don't know, old man, and I don't think he knows--yet."
"Beverly," said I, "let me tell you." And I told him.

After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take
it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.

Into these I dropped with: "Where's her father, anyhow?" I began to feel,
fantastically, that she mightn't have a father.

"He stopped in Savannah," Beverly answered. "He's coming over by the
train. Kitty--Charley's sister, Mrs. Bleecker--did the chaperoning for