Avenue.

The high-perched room was Dick Peyton's private office, a retreat
partitioned off from the larger enclosure in which, under a north light
and on a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily
engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the
office bore the sign: _Peyton and Gill, Architects_; but Gill was
an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself
with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small
apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of
the business was carried on.

It was to serve, on this occasion, as the scene of a tea designed, as Kate
Peyton was vividly aware, to introduce a certain young lady to the scene of
her son's labours. Mrs. Peyton had been hearing a great deal lately about
Clemence Verney. Dick was naturally expansive, and his close intimacy with
his mother--an intimacy fostered by his father's early death--if it had
suffered some natural impairment in his school and college days, had of
late been revived by four years of comradeship in Paris, where Mrs. Peyton,
in a tiny apartment of the Rue de Varennes, had kept house for him during
his course of studies at the Beaux Arts. There were indeed not lacking
critics of her own sex who accused Kate Peyton of having figured too
largely in her son's life; of having failed to efface herself at a period
when it is agreed that young men are best left free to try conclusions with
the world. Mrs. Peyton, had she cared to defend herself, might have said
that Dick, if communicative, was not impressionable, and that the closeness
of texture which enabled him to throw off her sarcasms preserved him also
from the infiltration of her prejudices. He was certainly no knight of the
apron-string, but a seemingly resolute and self-sufficient young man, whose
romantic friendship with his mother had merely served to throw a veil of