really is my own idea—­I have decided not to build all those Rhine castles, which useless notion, if I am not mistaken, originated with you.  I don’t want to disfigure my beautiful wilderness.  Mrs. Ascott and I had a very plain talk with Hamil and we forced him to agree with us that the less he did to improve my place the better for the place.  He seemed to take it good-humouredly.  He left yesterday to look over Mrs. Ascott’s place and plan for her a formal garden and Trianon at Pride’s Hall.  So he being out I wired also to Virginia and to Philip Gatewood, which will make it right—­four at a table.  Your brother-in-law plays a stiff game and your sister is a wonder!—­five grand slams last night!  But I played like a dub—­I’d been riding and walking and canoeing all day with Mrs. Ascott and I was terribly sleepy.

“So come on up, Louis.  I’ll forgive you—­but don’t mind if I growl at you before Mrs. Ascott as she thinks I ought to discipline you.  And, confound it, I ought to, and I will, too, if you don’t look out.  But I’ll be devilish glad to see you.

“Yours,
“W.  VAN BEUREN PORTLAW.”

Malcourt, in his arm-chair by the open window, lay back full length, every fibre of him vibrating with laughter.

Dolly Wilming at the piano continued running over the pretty firework melodies of last season’s metropolitan success—­a success built entirely on a Viennese waltz, the air of which might have been taken from almost any popular Yankee hymn-book.

He folded Portlaw’s letter and pocketed it; and lay for a while under the open window, enjoying his own noiseless mirth, gaily accompanied by Dolly Winning’s fresh, clear singing or her capricious improvising.

Begonias bloomed in a riotous row on the sill, nodding gently in the river-wind which also fluttered the flags and sails on yacht, schooner, and sloop under the wall of the Palisades.

That day the North River was more green than blue—­like the eyes of a girl he knew; summer, crowned and trimmed with green, brooded on the long rock rampart across the stream.  Turquoise patches of sky and big clouds, leafy parapets, ships passing to the sea; and in mid-stream an anchored island of steel painted white and buff, bristling with long thin guns, the flower-like flag rippling astern; another battle-ship farther north; another, another; and farther still the white tomb—­unlovely mansion of the dead—­on outpost duty above the river, guarding with the warning of its dead glories the unlovely mansions of the living ranged along the most noble terrace in the world.

And everywhere to north, south, and east, the endless waste of city, stark, clean-cut, naked alike of tree and of art, unsoftened even by the haze of its own exudations—­everywhere the window-riddled blocks of oblongs and cubes gridironed with steel rails—­New York in all the painted squalor of its Pueblo splendour.

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