so rare in the younger man that Ben could not bear to crush it with disapproval.

Increasingly, during the two years he was in France, Ben was displeased by David's letters. The Cords were described as kindly, well-educated people, fond one of another, considerate of the tutor, with old-fashioned traditions of American liberties. Ben asked himself if he would have been better pleased if David's employers had been cruel, vulgar, and blatant, and found the answer was in the affirmative. It would, he thought, have been a good deal safer for David's integrity if he had not been so comfortable.

For two summers Ben had made no protest, but the third summer, when the war was over and the allowance again possible, he urged David not to go back to Newport. David flatly refused to yield. He said he saw no reason why he should go on taking Ben's money when this simple way of earning a full living was open to him. Wasn't Ben's whole theory that everyone should be self-supporting? Why not be consistent?

Ignorant people might imagine that two affectionate brothers could not quarrel over an issue purely affectionate. But the Moretons did quarrel—more bitterly than ever before, and that is saying a great deal. With the extraordinary tenacity of memory that develops under strong emotion, they each contrived to recall and to mention everything which the other had done that was wrong, ridiculous, or humiliating since their earliest days. They parted with the impression on David's part that Ben thought him a self-indulgent grafter, and on Ben's side that David thought him a bully solely interested in imposing his will on those unfortunate enough to be dependent on him.

It was after half past four when, having walked up five flights of stairs, he let himself into his modest flat on the top floor of an old-fashioned brownstone house. As he opened the door, he called,

"Nora!"

No beautiful partner of a free-love affair appeared, but an elderly woman in spectacles who had once been Professor Moreton's cook, and now, doing all the housework for Ben, contrived to make him so comfortable that the editor of a more radical paper than his own had described the flat as "a bourgeois interior."

"Nora," said Ben, "put something in my bag for the night—I'm going to Newport in a few minutes."

He had expected a flood of questions, for Nora was no looker-on at life, and he was surprised by her merely observing that she was glad he was getting away from the heat. The truth was that she knew far more about David than he did. She had consistently coddled David since his infancy, and he told her a great deal. Besides, she took care of his things when he was at Ben's. She had known of sachets, photographs, and an engraved locket that he wore on his watch-chain. She was no radical. She had seen disaster come upon the old professor and attributed it, not to the narrowness of the trustees, but to the folly of the professor. She disapproved of most of Ben's friends, and would have despised his paper if she ever read it. The only good thing about it in her estimation was, he seemed to be able "to knock a living out of it"—a process which Nora regarded with a sort of gay casualness. She did not blame him for making so little money and thus keeping her housekeeping cramped, but she never in her own mind doubted that it would be far better if he had more. The idea that David was about to marry money seemed to her simply the reward of virtue—her own virtue in bringing David up so well. She knew that Mr. Cord opposed the marriage, but she supposed that Ben would arrange all that. She had great confidence in Ben. Still he was very young, very young, so she gave him a word of advice as she put his bag into his hand.

"Don't take any nonsense. Remember you're every bit as good as they. Only don't, for goodness' sake, Mr. Ben, talk any of your ideas to them. A rich man like Mr. Cord wouldn't like that."

Ben laughed. "How would you like me to bring you home a lovely heiress of my own?" he said.

She took a thread off his coat. "Only don't let her come interfering in my kitchen," she said, and hurried him away. He had a good deal of courage, but he had not enough to tell Nora he was going to Newport to stop her darling's marriage.

The Newport boat gets to Newport about two o'clock in the morning, and experienced travelers, if any such choose this method of approach, go on to Fall River and take a train back to Newport, arriving in time for a comfortable nine-o'clock breakfast. But Ben was not experienced, and he supposed that when you took a boat for Newport and reached Newport the thing to do was to get off the boat.

It had been a wonderful night on the Sound, and Ben had not been to bed, partly because, applying late on a Friday evening, he had not been able to get a room, but partly because the moon and the southerly breeze and the silver shores of Long Island and the red and white lighthouses had been too beautiful to leave. Besides, he had wanted to think out carefully what he was going to say to his brother.

To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe—one respects the other person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself, could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand, if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for which he and Cord were co-operating—only Cord would never believe it. That was one trouble with capitalists—they always thought themselves so damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that capitalists had gained this impression.

On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of course the boy had overslept, or hadn't received his telegram—Ben said this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in a luxurious bed in the Cords's house irritated him.

His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack, who volunteered to "take him up for fifty cents." It sounded reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the horses' hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o'clock in the morning, Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes, reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue, past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large, silent houses and walled gardens.

The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in "Faust" when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted windows were plainly visible from the road.

"Stop," said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it must be before he could rouse the Cord household.

He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward