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silence while the carriage bumped at a rapid pace over the uneven streets of Chicago. Hollister, so Hart reflected, must know what was in the will. He had been the old man's confidential business man for a good many years, and was one of the executors. Everett Wheeler, who was a lawyer with a large and very highly paid practice, was another.

Perhaps this cousin was to get the bulk of the property after all, though their uncle had never displayed any great fondness for Everett. The lawyer had always done the best that was expected of him. He had entered a law office from the high school, preferring to skip the intermediate years of college training, which Powers Jackson had offered him, and he never ceased referring to his success in his profession as partly due to the fact he had "fooled no time away at college." So far as his business went, which was to patch together crazy corporations, he had no particular use for a liberal education. He had no tastes whatsoever outside of this business and a certain mild interest in politics. His dull white features, sharpened to a vulpine point, and his large nose betrayed his temperament. He was a silent, cool-blooded, unpassionate American man of affairs, and it would be safe to say that he would die rich. Thus far he had not had enough emotion to get married. No! his cousin reflected, Everett was not a man after old Powers Jackson's heart! Their uncle was not a cold, passionless man. . .

...

Those two men opposite him knew what was the fact in this matter so momentous to him. They smoked, wrapped in their own thoughts.

"I wonder who was the joker who put up that monstrous Greek temple out there in the cemetery!" Jackson finally observed, in a nervous desire to say something.

"You mean the family mausoleum?" Everett asked severely, removing his cigar from his lips, and spitting carefully out of the half-opened window. "That

was done by a fellow named Roly, and it was considered a very fine piece of work. It was built the time aunt Frankie died." "It's a spooky sort of place to put a man into!"

"I think the funeral was what your uncle would have liked," Hollister remarked. "He hated to be eccentric, and yet he despised pretentious ceremonies. Everything was simple and dignified. The parson was good, too, in what he said. And the old men turned out in great numbers. I was glad of that! But I was surprised. It's nearly two years since he gave up the Works, and memories are short between master and man.'

"That's a fact. But he knew every man-jack about the place in the old days," Everett observed, removing his silk hat as if it were an ornamental incumbrance.

"Yes," said Hollister, taking up the theme. "I remember how he would come into the front office on pay days, and stand behind the grating while the men were signing off. He could call every one by a first name. It was Pete and Dave and Jerry and Steve, there were n't so many of those Hungarians and Slavs, the European garbage, then."

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he thought of the girl's face as he had seen it that day, utterly moved and transfixed with a strange emotion of tender sorrow that was half happiness. She was religious, he believed, meaning by that word that she was moved by certain feelings other than those which affected him or Everett or Hollister, even. And this new thought of her made her more precious in his eyes. He looked for her when they reached the sombre old house on Ohio Street, but she had already driven home.

As Hollister was leaving, he said to the young man :

"Can you come over to Everett's office to-morrow about four? Judge Phillips will be there, the other executor. We are to open the will. They have suggested that I ask you to join us," he added hastily, with an effort to be matter-of-fact.

"All right, Hollister," the young man answered, with an equal effort to appear unconcerned. "I'll be over! "

But his heart thumped strangely.

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He had been getting ready. He had chosen to go to Cornell rather than to a larger university, because some of the boys of his high school class were going there. With us in America such matters are often settled in this childish way. The reason why he chose the profession of architecture was, in the first place, scarcely less frivolous. A "fraternity brother" at Cornell, just home from Paris, fired the college boy's imagination for "the Quarter." But, once started in the course of architecture at the tech

nical school, he found that he had stumbled into something which really interested him. For the first time in his life he worked.

At the Beaux Arts he worked, also, though he did not forget the amenities of life. The two years, first talked of, expanded into two and a half, then rounded to three. Meanwhile the generous cheques from the office of the Bridge Works came with pleasant regularity. His mother wrote, "Powers hopes that you are deriving benefit from your studies in Paris." What the old man had said was, "How's Jackie doing these days, Amelia?" And young Hart was "doing" well. There were many benefits, not always orthodox, which the young American, established cosily on the Rue de l'Université, derived from Paris.

The day of preparation came to an end, however. Those last weeks of his stay in Europe he was joined by his mother and Helen Spellman. Powers Jackson had taken this occasion to send them both abroad. Mrs. Spellman being too much of an invalid to take the journey, Mrs. Amelia Hart had been very glad to have the girl's companionship. Jackson met them in Naples. After he had kissed his mother and taken her handbag, to which she was clinging in miserable suspicion of the entire foreign world, he turned to the girl, whose presence he had been conscious of all the time. Helen was not noticeably pretty or well dressed; but she had an air of race, a fineness of feature, a certain personal delicacy, to which the young man had long been unaccustomed. Perhaps three years of student life in Paris had prepared him to think very well of a young American woman.

So their six weeks in Italy had been very happy ones for all three, - six golden weeks of May and early June. The beautiful land smiled at them from every field and wall. Each fresh landscape in the panorama of their little journeys was another joy, a new excite

ment that burned in a flush of heightened color on the girl's face. One of their last days they spent at the little village of Ravello, on a hilltop above Amalfi, and there in the clear twilight of a warm June day, with gold-tipped clouds brooding over the Bay of Salerno, they came for the first time upon the personal note. They were leaning over the railing of the terrace in the Palumbo, listening to the bells in the churches of Vetri beneath them.

"Would n't this be good for always?" he murmured.

He was touched with sentimental selfpity at the thought of leaving all this, the beauty, the wonder, the joy of Europe! In another short month instead of this there would be Chicago, whose harsh picture three years had not softened.

"I don't know," the girl replied, with a long sigh for remembered joy. "One could not be as happy as this for months and years."

"I'd like to try!" he said lightly. "No! Not you," she retorted with sudden warmth. "What could a man do here?"

"There are a lot of fellows in Europe who manage to answer that question somehow. Most of the men I knew in Paris don't expect to go back yet, and not to Chicago anyway.'

Her lips compressed quickly. Evidently they were not the kind of men she thought well of.

"Why!" she stammered, words crowding tempestuously to her tongue. "How could you stay, and not work out your own life, not make your way in the world like uncle Powers? How it would trouble him to hear you say that!"

He was a trifle ashamed of his desire to keep out of the fight any longer Hers, he judged, was a militant, ambitious nature, and he was quick to feel what she expected of him.

After they had sat there a long time without speaking, she said gently, as if she wished to be just to him:

"It might be different, if one were an artist; but even then I should think a man would want to carry back what he had received here to the place he was born in, - should n't you?" "Well, perhaps," he admitted, "if it were n't just — Chicago!"

And these simple words of the girl spoken in the garden of Ravello were a tonic for other moments of regret.

They made the long voyage homewards through the Mediterranean, touching at Gibraltar for a last, faint glimpse of romance. It was a placid journey in a slow steamer, with a small company of dull, middle-aged Americans, and the two were left much to themselves. In the isolation of the sunny, windless sea, their acquaintance took on imperceptibly a personal character. After the fashion of the egotistic male, he told her, bit by bit, all that he knew about himself, his college days, his friends, and his work at the Beaux Arts. From the past, - his past,

they slid to the future that lay before him on the other shore of the Atlantic. He sketched for her in colored words the ideals of his majestic art. Tucked up on deck those long, cloudless nights, they touched the higher themes, what a man could do, as Richardson and Atwood had shown the glorious way, toward expressing the character and spirit of his race in brick and stone and steel!

Such thoughts as these touched the girl's imagination, just as the sweet fragments of a civilization finer than ours had stirred her heart in Italy. All these ideas she took to be the architect's original possessions, not being familiar with the froth of Paris studios, the wisdom of long déjeuners. And she was eager over his plans for the future. For something earnest and large was the first craving of her soul, something that had in it service and beauty in life. . . .

At the time of the great exposition in Chicago she had had these matters brought to her attention. Powers Jackson, as one of the directors of the enter

prise, had entertained many of the artists and distinguished men who came to the city, and at his dinner-table she had heard men talk whose vital ideals were being worked into the beautiful buildings beside the lake. Their words she had hoarded in her schoolgirl's memory, and now in her sympathy for the young architect she began to see what could be done with an awakened feeling for art, for social life, to make our strong young cities memorable. This, she dreamed shyly, would be the work of the man beside her!

He was handsome and strong, vigorously built, though inclined to heaviness of body. His brown hair waved under his straw hat, and a thick mustache turned stiffly upwards in the style of the German Emperor, which was then just coming into fashion. This method of wearing the mustache, and also a habit of dressing rather too well, troubled the girl; for she knew that uncle Powers would at once note such trivial aspects of his nephew. The keen old man might say nothing, but he would think contemptuous thoughts. The young architect's complexion was ruddy, healthily bronzed; his features were regular and large, as a man's should be. Altogether he was a handsome, alert, modern American. Too handsome! She thought apprehensively of the rough-looking, rude old man at home, his face tanned and beaten, knobby and hard like the gnarled stump of an oak!

She was very anxious that the architect should make a good impression on his uncle, not simply for his own sake, but for the lonely old man's comfort. She felt that she knew Powers Jackson better than his nephew did; knew what he liked and what he despised. She wanted him to love this nephew. Several times she talked to Jackson about his uncle. The young man listened with an amused smile, as if he had already a good formula for the old man.

Mansard brick menagerie on Ohio Street, where he has lived since the fire. All his friends have moved away from the neighborhood. But he thinks the blackwalnut rooms, the stamped leather on the walls, and the rest of it, is the best going yet. That buffet, as he calls it! It's early Victorian, a regular chef-d'œuvre of ugliness. That house!"

"It's always been his home," she protested, finding something trivial in putting this comic emphasis on sideboards and bookcases. "He cares about good things too. Lately he 's taken to buying engravings. Mr. Hollister interested him in them. And I think he would like to buy pictures, if he was n't afraid of being cheated, of making a fool of himself."

"You'll make him out a patron of the fine arts."

Jackson laughed long at the picture of his uncle as a connoisseur in art.

"Perhaps he will be yet!" she retorted stoutly. "At any rate, he is a very dear old man.”

He would not have described his uncle Powers in the same simple words. Still he had the kindest feelings toward him, mixed with a latent anxiety over what the old man would do about his allowance, now that his schooldays had come definitely to a close. . .

Thus in the long hours of that voyage, with the sound of the gurgling, dripping water all about them, soothed with the rhythm of pounding engines, the man and the woman came to a sort of knowledge of each other. There was created in the heart of each a vision of the other. The girl's vision was glorified by the warmth of her imagination, which transformed all her simple experiences. In her heart, if she had looked there, she would have seen an image of youth and power, very handsome, with great masculine hopes, and aspirations after unwrought deeds. Unconsciously she had given to that image something which she could never take back all the years of her

"Mother can't get him out of that life, let her marry whom she might!

And he could remember her, if hereafter he should come to love her, as she was these last days. The shadow of the end of the romance was upon her, and it left her subdued. To the artist in the architect her head was too large, the brow not smooth enough, the hair two shades too dark, the full face too broad. The blue eyes and the trembling, small mouth gave a certain childishness to her expression that the young man could not understand. It was only when she spoke that he was much moved; for her voice was very sweet, uncertain in its accents, tremulous. She seemed to breathe into commonplace words some revelation of herself. . . .

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In the morning of their arrival the lofty buildings of the great city loomed through the mist. The architect said: "There are the hills of the New World! Here endeth the first chapter."

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'I cannot believe it has ended," she replied slowly. "Nothing ends!"

Powers Jackson and Mrs. Spellman met the travelers in New York. It was just at the time that Jackson was negotiating with the promoters of a large trust for the sale of his Bridge Works. This fact his nephew did not learn for some months, for the old man made it a rule to tell nothing about his deeds and intentions. At any rate, he did sell the Works one morning in the lobby of his hotel and for his own price, which was an outrageous one as the stockholders of the new trust came to know to their chagrin.

He shook hands with his sister, kissed Helen on the forehead, and nodded to his nephew.

"How's the Pope, Amelia?" he asked gravely.

Did

you

"You need n't ask me! think, Powers, I'd be one to go over to the Vatican and kiss that old man's hand? I hope I'm too good a Christian to do that!"

Jackson said, continuing his joke. "I hoped you'd pay your respects to the Pope. Why, he's the smartest one of the whole bunch over there, I guess."

He looked to Helen for sympathy. It should be said that Powers Jackson regarded his sister Amelia as a fool, but that he never allowed himself to take advantage of the fact except in such trifling ways as this.

When the two men were alone in the private parlor at the hotel, the uncle said:

"So you've finished up now? You're all through over there?"

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Yes, sir," Hart answered, not feeling at all at his ease with this calm old man. "I guess I am ready to begin building, as soon as any one will have me!"

"I see there's plenty doing in your line, all over."

The architect fidgeted before he could think what to say. Then he expressed

his sense of gratitude for the great opportunities his uncle had given him in Paris. Jackson listened but said nothing. The architect was conscious that the old man had taken in with one sweep of his sharp little eyes his complete appearance. He suspected that the part in the middle of his brown hair, the pert lift to the ends of his mustache, the soft stock about his neck, the lavender colored silk shirt in which he had prepared to meet the pitiless glare of the June sun in the city,— that all these items had been noted and disapproved. He reflected somewhat resentfully that he was not obliged to make a guy of himself to please his uncle. He found his uncle's clothes very bad. Powers Jackson was a large man, and his clothes, though made by one of the best tailors in Chicago, had a draggled appearance, as if he had forgotten to take them off when he went to bed. However, when the old man next spoke, he made no reference to his nephew's attire.

"I was talking to Wright about you "Oh, don't be too hard on the feller," the other day. Ever heard of him?"

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