“Well, my dear,” said Tramlay to his wife one evening in late winter, “the spell is broken. Three different people have bought building-sites of the Haynton Bay Company, and a number of others seem interested. There’s been a good deal of money made this winter, and now people seem anxious to spend it. It’s about time for us to be considering plans for our villa,—eh?”

“Not until we are sure we shall have more than three neighbors,” said Mrs. Tramlay. “Besides, I would first like to have some certainty as to how large our family will be this summer.”

“How large? Why, the same size as usual, I suppose. Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Edgar,” said Mrs. Tramlay, impatiently, “for a man who has a business reputation for quick wits, I think you’re in some things the stupidest person who ever drew breath.”

Tramlay seemed puzzled. His wife finally came to his aid, and continued:

“I should like to know if Lucia’s affair is to dawdle along as it has been doing. June is as late in the season as is fashionable for weddings, and an engagement——”

“Oh!” interrupted the merchant, with a gesture of annoyance, “I’ve heard the customary talk about mother-love, and believed it, up to date, but I can’t possibly bring myself to be as anxious as you to get rid of our blessed first-born.”

“It is because I love her that I am so desirous of seeing her happy and settled,—not to get rid of her.”

“Yes, I suppose so; and I’m a brute,” said the husband. “Well, if Phil has been waiting until he should be certain about his own condition financially, he will not need to wait much longer. I don’t know whether it’s through brains, or tact, or what’s called lover’s luck, but he’s been doing so well among railroad-people that in common decency I must either raise his salary largely or give him an interest in the business.”

“Well, really, you speak as if the business depended upon him.”

“For a month or two he’s been taking all the orders; I’ve been simply a sort of clerk, to distribute them among mills, or find out where iron could be had for those who wanted it in haste. He’s after an order now—from the Lake and Gulfside Road—that I let him attempt at first merely to keep him from growing conceited. It seemed too great and difficult a job to place any hope on; but I am beginning to half believe he’ll succeed. If he does, I’ll simply be compelled to give him an interest in the business: if I don’t, some of my competitors will coax him away from me.”

“What! after all you have done for him?”

“Tut! tut! the favor is entirely on the other side. Had some outsider brought me the orders which that boy has taken, I would have had to pay twenty times as much in commissions as Phil’s salary has amounted to. What do you think of ‘Edgar Tramlay & Co.’ for a business sign, or even ‘Tramlay & Hayn’?”

“I suppose it will have to be,” said the lady, without any indication of gratification, “and, if it must be, the sooner the better, for it can’t help making Lucia’s position more certain. If it doesn’t do so at once, I shall believe it my duty to speak to the young man.”

“Don’t! don’t, I implore!” exclaimed the merchant. “He will think——”

“What he may think is of no consequence,” said Mrs. Tramlay. “It is time that he should know what city etiquette demands.”

“But it isn’t necessary, is it, that he should know how matter-of-fact and cold-hearted we city people can be about matters which country-people think should be approached with the utmost heart and delicacy? Don’t let him know what a mercenary, self-serving lot of wretches we are, until he is so fixed that he can’t run away.”

“Edgar, the subject is not one to be joked about, I assure you.”

“And I assure you, my dear, that I’m not more than half joking,—not a bit more.”

“I shall not say more than thousands of the most loving and discreet mothers have been obliged to say in similar circumstances,” said Mrs. Tramlay. “If you cannot trust me to discharge this duty delicately, perhaps you will have the kindness to undertake it yourself.”

“The very thing!” said Tramlay. “If he must have unpleasant recollections of one of us, I would rather it wouldn’t be his mother-in-law. The weight of precedent is against you, don’t you know?—though not through any fault of yours.”

“Will you seriously promise to speak to him? At once?—this very week?”

“I promise,” said Tramlay, solemnly, at the same time wickedly making a number of mental reservations.

“Then if there should be any mistake it will not be too late to recall poor Mr. Marge,” said Mrs. Tramlay.

“My dear wife,” said Tramlay, tenderly, “I know Marge has some good qualities, but I beg you to remember that by the time our daughter ought to be in the very prime of her beauty and spirits, unless her health fails, Marge will be nearly seventy years old. I can’t bear the thought of our darling being doomed to be nurse to an old man just when she will be most fit for the companionship and sympathy of a husband. Suppose that ten years ago, when you boasted you didn’t feel a day older than when you were twenty, I had been twenty years older than I am now, and hanging like a dead weight about your neck? Between us we have had enough to do in bringing up our children properly: what would you have done had all the responsibility come upon you alone? And you certainly don’t care to think of the probability of Lu being left a widow before she fairly reaches middle age?”

“Handsome widows frequently marry again, especially if their first husbands were well off.”

“Wife!”

Mrs. Tramlay looked guilty, and avoided her husband’s eye. She could not avoid his encircling arm, though, nor the meaning of his voice as he said,—

“Is there no God but society?”

“I didn’t mean to,” whispered Mrs. Tramlay. “All mothers are looking out for their daughters; I don’t think fathers understand how necessary it is. If you had shown more interest in Lucia’s future I might not have been so anxious. Fathers never seem to think that their daughters ought to have husbands.”

“Fathers don’t like girls to marry before they are women,” said Tramlay. “Even now I wish Lu might not marry until she is several years older.”

“Mercy!” exclaimed Mrs. Tramlay. “Would you want the poor child to go through several more years of late parties, and dancing, and dressing? Why, she’d become desperate, and want to go into a nunnery or become a novelist, or reformer, or something.”

“What? Is society really so dreadful to a young girl?” asked the husband.

“It’s the most tiresome thing in the world after the novelty wears off,” said Mrs. Tramlay, “unless she is fond of flirting, or gets into one of the prosy sets where they talk about nothing but books and music and pictures and blue china and such things.”

“‘Live and learn,’” quoted the merchant. “Next time I become a young man and marry I’ll bring up my family in the country. My sisters had at least horses and trees and birds and flowers and chickens to amuse them, and not one of them married until she was twenty-five.”

Mrs. Tramlay maintained a discreet silence, for, except their admiration for their brother, Mrs. Tramlay had never been able to find a point of contact in her sisters-in-law. Tramlay slowly left the room and went to his club, informing himself, as he walked, that there were times in which a man really needed the society of men.

Meanwhile, Phil had for the twentieth time been closeted with the purchasing officials of the Lake and Gulfside Railroad,—as disagreeable and suspicious a couple as he had ever found among Haynton’s assortment of expert grumblers. Had he been more experienced in business he would have been less hopeful, for, as everybody who was anybody in the iron trade knew the Lake and Gulfside had planned a branch nearly two hundred miles long, and there would be forty or fifty thousand tons of rails needed, everybody who was anybody in the iron trade was trying to secure at least a portion of the order. Phil’s suggestion that Tramlay should try to secure the contract had affected the merchant about as a proposition of a child to build a house might have done; but, to avoid depressing the young man’s spirits, he had consented, and had himself gone so far as to get terms, for portions of the possible order, from men who were looking for encouragement to open their long-closed mills. Unknown to the merchant, and fortunately for Phil, one of the Lake and Gulfside purchasing agents had years before chanced to be a director in a company that placed a small order with Tramlay, and, remembering and liking the way in which it had been filled, was predisposed toward the house’s new representative from the first. But Tramlay, not knowing this, laid everything to Phil’s luck when the young man invaded the whist-room of the club, called Tramlay away from a table just as cards had been dealt, and exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper,—

“I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” asked the merchant, not over-pleased at the interruption. Phil stared so wildly that his employer continued, “Not the smallpox, I trust. What is it? Can’t you speak?”

“I should think you’d know,” said the young man, looking somewhat aggrieved.

“Not Lake and Gulfside?”

“Exactly that,” said Phil, removing his hat and holding it just as he remembered to have seen a conqueror’s hat held in a colored print of “General Scott entering the City of Mexico.”

“Hurrah!” shouted the merchant, dashing to the floor the cards he held. This movement eliciting an angry protest from the table, Tramlay picked up the cards, thrust them into the hand of a lounger, said, “Play my hand for me.—Gentlemen, I must beg you to excuse me: sudden and important business,” seized his hat, and hurried Phil to the street, exclaiming,—

“Sure there is no mistake about it? It seems too good to be true.”

“There’s no mistake about this,” Phil replied, taking a letter from his pocket. The merchant hurried to the nearest street-lamp, looked at the written order, and said,—

“My boy, your fortune is made. Do you realize what a great stroke of business this is?”

“I hope so,” said Phil.

“What do you want me to do for you? Name your terms or figures.”

Phil was silent, for the very good reason that he did not know how to say what was in his heart.

“Suppose I alter my sign to Tramlay & Hayn, and make you my equal partner?”

Still Phil was silent.

“Well,” said the merchant, “it seemed to me that was a fair offer; but if it doesn’t meet your views, speak out and say what you prefer.”

“Mr. Tramlay,” said the young man, trying to speak calmly, but failing most lamentably, “they say a countryman never is satisfied in a trade unless he gets something to boot.”

“Very well. What shall it be?”

“Millions,—everything; that is, I wish you’d give me your daughter too.”

The merchant laughed softly and shook his head. Phil started, and his heart fell.

“I don’t see how I can do that,” said Tramlay; “for, unless my eyes deceive me, you already have her.”

“Thank heaven!” exclaimed Phil, devoutly.

“So say I,” the merchant responded.