“You wouldn’t care to stay in Newport all the time?”

“Not if I know myself,” he replied.  “I leave that part of it to you.”

“What part of it?” she demanded.

“You ought to know.  You do it pretty well,” he laughed.  “By the way, Honora, I’ve got to have a conference with Mr. Wing to-day, and I may not be home to lunch.”

“We’re dining there to-night,” she told him, in a listless voice.

Upon Ethel Wing had descended the dominating characteristics of the elder James, who, whatever the power he might wield in Wall Street, was little more than a visitor in Newport.  It was Ethel’s house, from the hour she had swept the Reel and Carter plans (which her father had brought home) from the table and sent for Mr. Farwell.  The forehanded Reginald arrived with a sketch, and the result, as every one knows, is one of the chief monuments to his reputation.  So exquisitely proportioned is its simple, two-storied marble front as seen through the trees left standing on the old estate, that tourists, having beheld the Chamberlin and other mansions, are apt to think this niggardly for a palace.  Two infolding wings, stretching towards the water, enclose a court, and through the slender white pillars of the peristyle one beholds in fancy the summer seas of Greece.

Looking out on the court, and sustaining this classic illusion, is a marble-paved dining room, with hangings of Pompeiian red, and frescoes of nymphs and satyrs and piping shepherds, framed between fluted pilasters, dimly discernible in the soft lights.

In the midst of these surroundings, at the head of his table, sat the great financier whose story but faintly concerns this chronicle; the man who, every day that he had spent down town in New York in the past thirty years, had eaten the same meal in the same little restaurant under the street.  This he told Honora, on his left, as though it were not history.  He preferred apple pie to the greatest of artistic triumphs of his daughter’s chef, and had it; a glorified apple pie, with frills and furbelows, and whipped cream which he angrily swept to one side with contempt.

“That isn’t apple pie,” he said.  “I’d like to take that Frenchman to the little New England hilltown where I went to school and show him what apple pie is.”

Such were the autobiographical snatches—­by no means so crude as they sound that reached her intelligence from time to time.  Mr. Wing was too subtle to be crude; and he had married a Playfair, a family noted for good living.  Honora did not know that he was fond of talking of that apple pie and the New England school at public banquets; nor did Mr. Wing suspect that the young woman whom he was apparently addressing, and who seemed to be hanging on his words, was not present.

It was not until she had put her napkin on the table that she awoke with a start and gazed into his face and saw written there still another history than the one he had been telling her.  The face was hidden, indeed, by the red beard.  What she read was in the little eyes that swept her with a look of possession:  possession in a large sense, let it be emphasized, that an exact justice be done Mr. James Wing,—­she was one of the many chattels over which his ownership extended; bought and paid for with her husband.  A hot resentment ran through her at the thought.