dining early, to take the Duke to the Opera." 

 After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon the Archer family. 

 "Gracious—how romantic!" at last broke explosively from Janey. No one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had long since given up trying to interpret them. 

 Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh.  "Provided it all turns out for the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will not.  "Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes this evening: I really shan't know what to say to him." 

 "Poor mother! But he won't come—" her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown. 

 

 

 XI. 

 Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm. 

 Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity. As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified. 

 "My dear sir—" he always addressed Archer as "sir"—"I have sent for you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment, I prefer not to mention either to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."  The gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for, as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his own grandson. 

 He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow.  "For family reasons—" he continued. 

 Archer 

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