who pulls furiously through it in a rowboat loaded with ambitions, ballasted with brightly moral resolves, and buffeted by the cross seas of duty and conscience. That's rather neat, isn't it?"

"You can't drift safely very long without ballast," said the girl, smiling.

"Watch me."

She did not answer that she had been watching him for the last few years, or tell him how it had hurt her to hear his name linked with the gossip of fashionably vapid doings among idle and vapid people. For his had been an inheritance of ability and culture, and the leisure to develop both. Out of idleness and easy virtue had at last emerged three generations of Desboros full of energy and almost ruthless ability—his great-grandfather, grandfather and father—but he, the fourth generation, was throwing back into the melting pot all that his father and grandfathers had carried from it—even the material part of it. Land and fortune, were beginning to disappear, together with the sturdy mental and moral qualities of a race that had almost overcome its vicious origin under the vicious Stuarts. Only the physical stamina as yet seemed to remain intact; for Desboro was good to look upon.

"An odd thing happened the other night—or, rather, early in the mor[Pg 18]ning," she said. "We were awakened by a hammering at the door and a horn blowing—and guess who it was?"

[Pg 18]

"Not Gabriel—though you look immortally angelic to-day——"

"Thank you, Jim. No; it was Cary and Elena Clydesdale, saying that their car had broken down. What a ridiculous hour to be motoring! Elena was half dead with the cold, too. It seems they'd been to a party somewhere and were foolish enough to try to motor back to town. They stopped with us and took the noon train to town. Elena told me to give you her love; that's what reminded me."

"Give her mine when you see her," he said pleasantly.

When he returned to his house he sat down with a notion of trying to bring order out of the chaos into which his affairs had tumbled. But the mere sight of his desk, choked with unanswered letters and unpaid bills, sickened him, and he threw himself on the sofa and picked up his book, determined to rid himself of Silverwood House and all its curious, astonishing and costly contents.

"Tell Riley to be on hand Monday," he said to Mrs. Quant that evening. "I 

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