men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town
to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing
on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to
house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky
sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from
its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused to look at the new
building,--the monument of his success as a merchant.

"Pretty good? Corbin's doing it,--he's the best in the country, they tell
me."

Soon they kept on past the new building into an old quarter of the city,
the Colonel apparently having some purpose that guided his devious course
through these unattractive streets.

"There!" he exclaimed at last, pointing across a dirty street to a shabby
little brick house. "That's the place where Isabelle's mother and I started
in St. Louis. We had a couple of rooms over there the first winter. The
store was just a block further west. It's torn down now. I passed some of
the best days of my life in those rooms on the second story.... It isn't
the outside that counts, my boy!" The Colonel tucked his hand beneath the
young man's arm, as they turned back to the newer quarters of the city.

Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the
Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington,
and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those
foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that
the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America.... But her objections
could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.