serious.  Aside from the announcement in the letter, the very fact of writing it was significant, conveying an intimation that the reader might be interested in what concerned the writer.  The letter was longer than it need have been, for one thing, as if the pen, once started on its errand, ran on con amore.  The writer was coming to Brandon; business, to be sure, was the excuse; but why should it have been necessary to announce to her a business visit?  There crept into the letter somehow a good deal about his daily life, linked, to be sure, with mention of places and people in which she had recently an interest.  He had been in Washington, and there were slight sketches of well-known characters in Congress and in the Government; he had been in Chicago, and even as far as Denver, and there were little pictures of scenes that might amuse her.  There was no special mystery about all this travel and hurrying from place to place, but it gave Margaret a sense of varied and large occupations that she did not understand.  Through it all there was the personality that had been recently so much in her thoughts.  He was coming.  That was a very solid fact that she must meet.  And she did not doubt that he was coming to see her, and soon.  That was a definite and very different idea from the dim belief that he would come some time.  He had signed himself hers “faithfully.”

It was a letter that could not be answered like the other one; for it raised questions and prospects, and the thousand doubts that make one hesitate in any definite step; and, besides, she pleased herself to think that she did not know her own mind.  He had not asked if he might come; he had said he was coming, and really there was no answer to that.  Therefore she put it out of her mind-another curious mental process we have in dealing with a matter that is all the time the substratum of our existence.  And she was actually serious; if she was reflective, she was conscious of being judicially reflective.

But in this period of calm and reflection it was impossible that a woman of Margaret’s habits and temperament should not attempt to settle in her mind what that life was yonder of which she had a little taste; what was the career that Henderson had marked out for himself; what were his principles; what were the methods and reasons of his evident success.  Endeavoring in her clear mind to separate the person, about whose personality she was so fondly foolish, from his schemes, which she so dimly comprehended, and applying to his somewhat hazy occupations her simple moral test, were the schemes quite legitimate?  Perhaps she did not go so far as this; but what she read in the newspapers of moneymaking in these days made her secretly uneasy, and she found herself wishing that he were definitely practicing some profession, or engaged in some one solid occupation.

In the little parliament at our house, where everything, first and last, was overhauled and brought to judgment, without, it must be confessed, any visible effect on anything, one evening a common “incident” of the day started the conversation.  It was an admiring account in a newspaper of a brilliant operation by which three or four men had suddenly become millionaires.