triumph, hardly clouded at all now. As she and mamma had planned it, so
it had fallen out....

Many eyes had followed this shining pair as they quitted the common
gathering-place. She, as we have seen, was inviting as a spectacle. He,
to the nobodies, was simply one of the sights of the place, like the
Fort. And his distinguished House was still a small one, at that, not
yet arrived where another generation would unfailingly put it. If the
grandfather of Hugo Canning had founded the family, financially
speaking, it was his renowned father who had raised it so fast and far,
doubling and redoubling the Canning fortune with a velocity by no means
unprecedented in the eighties and nineties. To-day there were not many
names better known in the world of affairs, in the rarer social
altitudes, even in the shore-hotels of the provinces....

And the son and heir of the name and fortune, who now trod the Beach
piazza with Miss Carlisle Heth, was obviously more than many sons of
wealth, much more than a mere trousered incident to millions. This one
saw in the first glance at his Olympian bearing; but Carlisle Heth knew
more than that. Upon this young man the enterprising vehicles of modern
history had, long since, conferred an individual celebrity. Often had
the Sunday editors told their "public" of his exploits in the sporting
and social realms, as they called them; not rarely had journals of a
more gossipy character paragraphed him smartly, using their asterisks to
remove all doubt as to who was meant. Before such an evening as this had
ever crossed her maiden's dreams, Carlisle Heth had read of Hugo
Canning....

It was a bad throat, a God-given touch of bronchitis or whatnot, that
had sent the great young man south. This was known through Willie Kerr,