“Thank you.  I have never yet felt the need of any man’s assistance.  In my own jurisdiction, I admit no peers.  I am sorry you forced me to speak so strongly, but candor is best.  Until I ask it no human being must volunteer advice or criticism.  Go on and play cards and amuse yourself and spend what you like in doing it—­but don’t annoy me by trying to make money.  I won’t have it.  No—­leave that whiskey alone—­” He peremptorily stretched out his hand, as his father reached again for the decanter.  “You’ve had enough for this evening.  In another moment you will be tendering additional useless information.”

Again the bell rang, and in the library door he saw Mary Burton, radiant in evening-dress, and the ermine of a long opera-cloak.  Her smile was as luminous as sunshine.  Behind her—­it suddenly struck Hamilton that the sight of that particular face across her shoulder was becoming a chronic accompaniment—­stood Jefferson Edwardes.

Both of them were laughing—­with a note of mutual understanding.

“Mary,” announced her brother, “I want to have a dinner and a dance next week.  I want it to be the most memorable affair of the season.  Are you in for it?”

She looked at him with sudden amazement, and then her merriment broke out in a series of silvery peals.  She turned to Edwardes and repeated in a mockery of awed surprise.

“He wants to have a dance!  Do my ears deceive me?  Hamilton whom we can’t drag to a party with a truant officer wants a dance.”

Edwardes smilingly lifted the cloak from her shoulders and held out his hand.  “Good-night.  Try to get me an invitation,” he begged.  “Mr. Burton, can’t I drop you at your house?”

“If you don’t mind.”  The elderly gentleman rose and made his way toward the hall, with a step that wavered from the line.  When they had gone, Hamilton accompanied his sister to the stairs, with an arm about her waist.

“Mary,” he suggested, “a question has just occurred to me.  What has become of your duke?”

She turned on the landing and laughed.

“When I came back from abroad, you begged me to rid myself of foreign affectations,” she announced.  “He was one of them and I took your advice.”

“I only begged you to drop your affectations of speech.  What I called your pidgin English,” he assured her.  “I didn’t seek to hamper your young affections.”

“Then I will reply to your question in very colloquial American,” she retorted.  “As to the duke—­I tied a can to him.”  She turned and ran lightly up the stairs.

* * * * *

Paul had sat through the opera that evening with his customary intensity of interest—­but the chatter in the box had irritated him.  He had been, of late, seeing a great deal of Loraine Haswell, and he thought she at least might have sympathized with his mood and refrained from disconcerting small talk.  Their intimacy had so ripened that she should have understood how the things he had to say in their tete-a-tetes could not be uttered in company.  So when she invited him to join her supper-party he declined with a poor grace.