for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.



CHAPTER V

Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man
who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the
window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their
return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine,
a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache
--relic of a forgotten Anglomania--had been profoundly black, but
now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer
whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness
and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some
jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray
waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a
button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant
of patriot warriors.

The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr.
Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation
black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high
and narrow "Eastlake" bookcases with long glass doors, and upon
comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless "woodwork"
everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and
Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years
of possession, as "very fine things." They had been the first people
in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had
rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they