It was topsy-turvy, March-hare weather, which perhaps accounted for the
early April dementia that possessed the children at recurring intervals,
and which nothing ever checked except the ultimate slumber of infantile
exhaustion.

If anybody in the house possessed authority to punish them, nobody
exercised it. Servants grown gray in the Seagrave service endured much,
partly for the children's sakes, partly in memory of the past; but the
newer and younger domestics had less interest in the past glories and
traditions of an old New York family which, except for two little
children, ten years old, had perished utterly from the face of the land.

The entire domestic régime was a makeshift--had been almost from the
beginning. Mrs. Farren, the housekeeper, understood it; Howker, the
butler, knew it; Lacy knew it--he who had served forty years as coachman
in the Seagrave family.

For in all the world there remained not one living soul who through ties
of kinship was authorised to properly control these children. Nor could
they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy
recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming
gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a pleasant
legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded stories told
them by Kathleen Severn and by Anthony Seagrave's old servants.

Yet, in the land, and in his own city of Manhattan, their grandfather
had been a very grand man, with his large fortune, now doubled and still
increasing; he had been a very distinguished man in the world of fashion
with his cultivated taste in art and wine and letters and horses; he had
been a very important man, too, in the civic, social, and political