“My dear,” she exclaimed, “did you go to Sutcliffe?  What a wonderful school it is!  I fully intend to send my daughter Louise there.”

An almost irresistible desire came over Honora to run away.  She excused herself instead, and hurried back towards her room.  On the way she met Howard in the corridor, and he held a telegram in his hand.

“I’ve got some bad news, Honora,” he said.  “That is, bad from the point of view of our honeymoon.  Sid Dallam is swamped with business, and wants me in New York.  I’m afraid we’ve got to cut it short.”

To his astonishment she smiled.

“Oh, I’m so glad, Howard,” she cried.  “I—­I don’t like this place nearly so well as New Orleans.  There are—­so many people here.”

He looked relieved, and patted her on the arm.

“We’ll go to-night, old girl,” he said.

CHAPTER II

“Stafford park”

There is a terrifying aspect of all great cities.  Rome, with its leviathan aqueducts, its seething tenements clinging to the hills, its cruel, shining Palatine, must have overborne the provincial traveller coming up from Ostia.  And Honora, as she stood on the deck of the ferry-boat, approaching New York for the second time in her life, could not overcome a sense of oppression.  It was on a sharp December morning, and the steam of the hurrying craft was dazzling white in the early sun.  Above and beyond the city rose, overpowering, a very different city, somehow, than that her imagination had first drawn.  Each of that multitude of vast towers seemed a fortress now, manned by Celt and Hun and, Israelite and Saxon, captained by Titans.  And the strife between them was on a scale never known in the world before, a strife with modern arms and modern methods and modern brains, in which there was no mercy.

Hidden somewhere amidst those bristling miles of masonry to the northward of the towers was her future home.  Her mind dwelt upon it now, for the first time, and tried to construct it.  Once she had spoken to Howard of it, but he had smiled and avoided discussion.  What would it be like to have a house of one’s own in New York?  A house on Fifth Avenue, as her girl friends had said when they laughingly congratulated her and begged her to remember that they came occasionally to New York.  Those of us who, like Honora, believe in Providence, do not trouble ourselves with mere matters of dollars and cents.  This morning, however, the huge material towers which she gazed upon seemed stronger than Providence, and she thought of her husband.  Was his fibre sufficiently tough to become eventually the captain of one of those fortresses, to compete with the Maitlands and the Wings, and others she knew by name, calmly and efficiently intrenched there?

The boat was approaching the slip, and he came out to her from the cabin, where he had been industriously reading the stock reports, his newspapers thrust into his overcoat pocket.