family which I have brought up with me from an abandoned farm to the
high places of success must regard my wishes."

"You have summarized with the modesty of a tyrant and a czar," she
replied as her eyes suddenly broke into an unexpected fire and her
uptilted chin set itself defiantly, "the many favors that your hand of
self-made royalty has conferred upon your suppliant family." Her musical
voice took on a deeper thrill. "You have reminded me that my father and
mother, my brother and myself, are all but parasites that feed upon your
so-great powers of achievement. _Eh bien_, you have made a mistake. My
mother is a saint--"

"If any one dared to contradict that--" interrupted Hamilton hotly, but
she halted him with an imperious wave of her hand.

"If my czar-like brother will permit his sister to address his throne,"
she said with quiet sarcasm, "I shall esteem it a gracious favor. Let us
be frank with each other. My mother is a saint and my father a good man.
My brother, Paul, is a genius in music--and a weakling--but, as you say,
each of them is without power. Each of them is a parasite and you are
the oak upon which they grow and bloom. But as for me--" She stopped and
laughed, and suddenly Hamilton Burton realized that his sister Mary was
not the child he had always regarded her: not the slip of a girl that
had been sent away in the infancy of his fortune to be educated abroad,
but a woman of twenty-five, and an unusual woman.

"As for me," she continued slowly, "I think you have made a mistake.
Whence, _mon cher_, came this fire in your soul which told you back
there in the barren hills that you were not like little men? May it not
be that this genius came to you from some remote ancestor? May it not