"They leave it to us," he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery of
the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that her
questions had gone unanswered.

Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which consisted
largely in saying: "O Grandfather! Oh, you didn't! O _Grandfather_!"

Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
piercingly.

He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was in
itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations had
obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his life did he deny the
value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.

He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away