are on a respectable pavement once more."

Mabel, turning a sudden corner, had given them a quick transition from
the rattle and jar of granite to the gentle palpitation that is possible
on well-packed macadam. The carriage passed in review a series of
towering and glittering hotels, told off a score or more of residences of
the elder day, and presently drew up before the gate of an antiquated
homestead in the neighborhood of the Panoramas.

"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst of
all this stir and change!"




II


It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which
made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased
it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which
bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth
between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore
of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias
which bordered the roadway that ran below him.

"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the