from her own complexities.

Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been
pardoned for thinking smiles the habitual wear of the human countenance;
and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily tinged by the
cordial terms on which they had always met each other. He had in fact found
life, from the start, an uncommonly agreeable business, culminating fitly
enough in his engagement to the only girl he had ever wished to marry,
and the inheritance, from his unhappy step-brother, of a fortune which
agreeably widened his horizon. Such a combination of circumstances might
well justify a young man in thinking himself of some account in the
universe; and it seemed the final touch of fitness that the mourning which
Denis still wore for poor Arthur should lend a new distinction to his
somewhat florid good looks.

Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future husband's
point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance which
allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments. There was, for
instance, no one more sentimentally humane than Denis's mother, the
second Mrs. Peyton, a scented silvery person whose lavender silks and
neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its blinds drawn down toward
all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a
"dispensation" in the fact that her step-son had never married, and that
his death had enabled Denis, at the right moment, to step gracefully into
affluence. Was it not, after all, a sign of healthy-mindedness to take the
gifts of the gods in this religious spirit, discovering fresh evidence of
"design" in what had once seemed the sad fact of Arthur's inaccessibility
to correction? Mrs. Peyton, beautifully conscious of having done her "best"
for Arthur, would have thought it unchristian to repine at the providential
failure of her efforts. Denis's deductions were, of course, a little less