Grace hardly heard her.

“Lily,” she asked, “you are not in love with this Cameron person, are you?”

But Lily’s easy laugh reassured her.

“No, indeed,” she said.  “I am not.  I shall probably marry beneath me, as you would call it, but not William Wallace Cameron.  For one thing, he wouldn’t have grandfather in his family.”

Some time later Mademoiselle tapped at Grace’s door, and entered.  Grace was reclining on a chaise longue, towels tucked about her neck and over her pillows, while Castle, her elderly English maid, was applying ice in a soft cloth to her face.  Grace sat up.  The towel, pinned around her hair like a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like appearance to her still lovely face.

“Well?” she demanded.  “Go out for a minute, Castle.”

Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.

“I have spoken to Ellen,” she said, her voice cautious.  “A young man who does not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy.  What is that, Mrs. Cardew?”

“It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle.  Her grandfather—­”

“But not handsome,” insisted Mademoiselle, “and lame!  Also, I know the child.  She is not in love.  When that comes to her we shall know it.”

Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.

“She is changed, isn’t she, Mademoiselle?”

Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.

“A phase,” she said.  She had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition that would pass.  “A phase, only.  Now that she is back among familiar things, she will become again a daughter of the house.”

“Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her—­”

“She ’as had liberty,” said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an aspirate.  “It is like wine to the young.  It intoxicates.  But it, too, passes.  In my country—­”

But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of Mademoiselle’s country.  She settled herself on her pillows.

“Call Castle, please,” she said.  “And—­do warn her not to voice those ideas of hers to her grandfather.  In a country pharmacy, you say?”

“And lame, and not fond of women,” corroborated Mademoiselle.  “Ca ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n’est-ce pas?”

CHAPTER II

Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital.  That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel.  The iron business had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was still in its infancy.

Anthony’s father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a monthly pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the future of iron.  But he had never dreamed of steel.  But “sixty-five” saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream.  He went to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the first successful Bessemer converter.  When he started east again he knew what he was to make his life work.