one could obtain a lease of Mitchell House. Applicants, Vesperian or
"foreigners," were kept waiting; almost as if the invisible agent were
examining into their eligibility. And it began to be observed that
leaseholders were invariably light, frivolous, pleasure-loving people,
such as kept the big house crowded with youth and folly, to company youth
of its own. Such lessees were like to make agriculture a mockery; the
Mitchell Place, as a farm, became a hissing, and a proverb, and an
astonishment: a circumstance so singularly at variance with remembered
thrift of the reputed owner as to keep green that owner's name. Nor was
that all. As youth became mature and wise, in the sad heartrending
fashion youth has, or flitted to new hearths, in that other heartbreaking
way of youth, it was noted that leases were not to be renewed on any
terms; and the new tenants, in turn, were ever such light and unthrift
folk as the old, always with tall sons and gay daughters--as if the
mythical agent or his ghostly principal had set apart that old house
to mirth and joy and laughter, to youth and love. It was remembered then,
on certain struggling hill farms, that old McClintock had been childless;
and certain hill babies were cuddled the closer for that.

Then, thirty years later, or forty--some such matter--McClintock slipped
back to Vesper unheralded--very many times a millionaire; incidentally a
hopeless invalid, sentenced for life to a wheeled chair; Vesper's most
successful citizen.

Silent, uncomplaining, unapproachable, and grim, he kept to his rooms in
the Iroquois, oldest of Vesper's highly modern hotels; or was wheeled
abroad by his one attendant, who was valet, confidant, factotum, and
friend--Cornelius Van Lear, withered, parchment-faced, and brown,
strikingly like Rameses II as to appearance and garrulity. It was to Van
Lear that Vesper owed the known history of those forty years of