Now and then Fraulein braved the terrors of the library, small neatly-written lists in her hands.  Miss Elinor needed this or that.  He would check up the lists, sign his name to them, and Elinor and Fraulein would have a shopping excursion.  He never gave Elinor money.

On one of the lists one day he found the word, added in Elinor’s hand:  “Horse.”

“Horse?” he said, scowling up at Fraulein.  “There are six horses in the stable now.”

“Miss Elinor thought—­a riding horse—­”

“Nonsense!” Then he thought a moment.  There came back to him a picture of those English gentlewomen from among whom he had selected his wife, quiet-voiced, hard-riding, high-colored girls, who could hunt all day and dance all night.  Elinor was a pale little thing.  Besides, every gentlewoman should ride.

“She can’t ride around here.”

“Miss Elinor thought—­there are bridle paths near the riding academy.”

It was odd, but at that moment Anthony Cardew had an odd sort of vision.  He saw the little grocer lying stark and huddled among the phlox by the stable, and the group of men that stooped over him.

“I’ll think about it,” was his answer.

But within a few days Elinor was the owner of a quiet mare, stabled at the academy, and was riding each day in the tan bark ring between its white-washed fences, while a mechanical piano gave an air of festivity to what was otherwise rather a solemn business.

Within a week of that time the riding academy had a new instructor, a tall, thin young man, looking older than he was, with heavy dark hair and a manner of repressed insolence.  A man, the grooms said among themselves, of furious temper and cold eyes.

And in less than four months Elinor Cardew ran away from home and was married to Jim Doyle.  Anthony received two letters from a distant city, a long, ecstatic but terrified one from his daughter, and one line on a slip of paper from her husband.  The one line read:  “I always pay my debts.”

Anthony made a new will, leaving Howard everything, and had Elinor’s rooms closed.  Fraulein went away, weeping bitterly, and time went on.  Now and then Anthony heard indirectly from Doyle.  He taught in a boys’ school for a time, and was dismissed for his radical views.  He did brilliant editorial work on a Chicago newspaper, but now and then he intruded his slant-eyed personal views, and in the end he lost his position.  Then he joined the Socialist party, and was making speeches containing radical statements that made the police of various cities watchful.  But he managed to keep within the letter of the law.

Howard Cardew married when Elinor had been gone less than a year.  Married the daughter of a small hotel-keeper in his college town, a pretty, soft-voiced girl, intelligent and gentle, and because Howard was all old Anthony had left, he took her into his home.  But for many years he did not forgive her.  He had one hope, that she would give Howard a son to carry on the line.  Perhaps the happiest months of Grace Cardew’s married life were those before Lily was born, when her delicate health was safeguarded in every way by her grim father-in-law.  But Grace bore a girl child, and very nearly died in the bearing.  Anthony Cardew would never have a grandson.