In Hamilton Burton’s face there remained no echo of the impatience of a few minutes past.  In his serene eyes was no hint of remembered annoyance.  As he drew back his sister’s chair, one saw in his masterful face only the satisfied pride of a man fastidious of taste in all things from neck-scarfs to women.

“I’m truly sorry, Mary,” he declared, “to have inconvenienced you, but you must let me be a little selfish.  The only time I can be sure of seeing you will be across the breakfast-table, and that privilege you must grant—­because you are too delectable a sister to do without.”

“Ah,” she laughed, “but I did not know that here in America the men knew how to say the pretty things—­and to their own sisters, too!  But it is for me to apologize.  It is I who let the coffee grow cold.  I have been spoiled abroad where people are very lazy.”  Under her smiling eyes the two men sat content while she made of serving the Bolivian coffee a ceremonial as pretty as a fete.

Young Bristoll, usually loquacious enough, was not talkative this morning.  What had happened to more hardened philanderers abroad was happening to him, and the shield which he had always succeeded in holding safely before his heart was being lowered under the bright archery of Mary Burton’s eyes.

At last he rose, and his chief said quietly, “Carl, I shall be an hour late.  Will you run down to the office and sit on the lid until I get there?”

The secretary’s brows went up.  “You were to meet several of the directors of the Inter-Ocean Coal and Ore at ten-fifteen,” he reminded.

“Let them wait,” retorted Burton placidly.  “I’m usually punctual enough.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mary with an adorable show of penitence, “and it is I who am causing Monsieur Coal and Monsieur Ore to wait—­I am so sorry!”

But, when Bristoll had gone and Hamilton had led the way into the library, safe from the overhearing of the servants, the girl’s manner abruptly changed.  She stood by the broad desk, resting her slender fingers lightly on the mahogany top, and turned to her brother.  Her attitude was very straight and regal, and her voice, though still soft and musical, had in it the quiet ring of defiance.

“So!” she said.  “So, in my brother’s house I come and go under orders?  So, I rise when he commands it and go to bed at his direction.”

Hamilton Burton paused with his fingers on the knob of a wall-safe from which he had meant to take a package that he had placed there as a gift in celebration of her home-coming.  It had pleased him, as he was shown that rope of splendidly matched pearls in the establishment of the continent’s premier jeweller, that he was able to buy such gifts.  Of the twenty millions of families in America, nineteen million would have regarded their cost as a large fortune upon whose income they could live at ease while life lasted.  But Hamilton Burton had been even prouder that on his sister’s throat their beauty would after all be the secondary beauty, and with the eye of the connoisseur he had rejected several of the graduated gems and demanded that in their place more perfect ones be substituted.  Agents of the great house, skilled in the nuances of selection, had sought far to better them until the result was satisfactory to the exacting taste of the purchaser.