Judged by every ordinary standard, Mary Burton should have been a very happy young woman, sitting crowned and in state, while before her Life passed in review.  This afternoon, however, certain reflections brought the harassment of unrest to her eyes and a droop of wistfulness to the curve of her lips.

Self-analysis, that rude guest who comes sometimes, as unbidden and unwelcome as a constable, to set all one’s favorite vanities out of doors and evict one’s self-complacency, had intruded upon her thoughts.  Though she had the amelioration of a pier glass which gave her a view of all her beauty, from the coronal of burnished hair to the satin points of small slippers, she did not seem quite happy.  Mary was discovering that nature had endowed her with a brain which refused to accept longer its heretofore placid function of augmenting her physical allurements with its cleverness and its power of charm.  Now it was in insurrection.  Vassal no longer to the sense-thrilling appeal of eyes and lips and color and delicate curves, it was turning its batteries inward and preying upon itself.

Self-accusation had come to dispossess self-adulation.

Perhaps the silent voices of the mountains were in part responsible.  Haverly Lodge lay in acres not only smooth, but elaborately beautified, yet the margins of the estate met and merged with nature’s ragged fringe.  Metaled roads ran out in lumber trails where the Adirondacks reared turrets of granite and primal forests.  In summer, ease-loving guests took their pleasure here, but when winter held the hills, wild deer came down and gingerly picked their way close to the sundials and marble basins of the sunken gardens.  Foxes, too, stole on cushioned feet across the terraces at the end of the pergola.

The master of Haverly Lodge was the great little man who chewed always at an unlighted cigar and built industries as a child rears houses of blocks.  This Adirondack “camp” was one of H.A.  Harrison’s favorite playthings.  Here alone the nervous restlessness that drove him gave place to something like peace.  Among the guests now gathered there was Mary Burton.  Hamilton Burton was absent, as he was always absent from the purely social side of the world into whose center he had forced his way.  For such diversions he had neither time nor taste, but like a general who, under the dim light of his tent lantern, sticks pins into a war map, it pleased him to have his sister take her triumphant place among the court idlers whom he scorned.

Now she sat in her room overlooking the terraces and gardens at the side of the mansion.  Just outside her window was a small gallery over whose wide coping clambered a profusion of flowering vines.  Through half-drawn curtains as she lay in a long reclining chair she could see the purple veil of the young summer draped along the distance where rosy fires burned in the wake of day—­or she could turn her eyes inward and have the other picture which the mirror offered.  Her slender hands lay inertly quiet in her lap, holding an envelope.