"Belden?"

"Yes. He has decided finally to let your father put on those two extra
stories, and what do you think he wants in exchange? He wants to make the
firm over into a stock company. He's fixing a place for that boy of
his--that's what."

"Well, haven't we got a boy, too?" retorted Jane, severely. She went out,
and gave the door a loud slam behind her.

But David Marshall, back again in the bay-window, was thinking neither of
the sinuosities of Mother Van Horn, nor of the aggressions of his junior
partner, nor even of the just-concluding courses of the annual
game-dinner. His thoughts had slipped back into the early times; he and
Sue Lathrop (the Mrs. Granger Bates of to-day) were sitting together in
the old, long-vanished Metropolitan Hall listening to the "Nightingale
Serenaders," and the year was 'fifty-seven.




IV


"Well, here goes!" said Jane, half aloud, with her foot on the lowest of
the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous pillared
arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a sturdy and
rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough faced glitter of a vast and
variegated facade; and higher still the morning sun shattered its beams