She seated herself and glanced up at him with a half-challenge in her eyes, even though her lips smiled charmingly.

"Mary"--the voice was now hard and the face was very fixed--"there is very little to understand and I have very little time for discussion.

You have been abroad, enjoying every human advantage that money could buy you. When you were a little kid washing dishes in the White Mountains you cried to be pretty. If you had cried for the moon I'd have tried to get it for you. If I'd failed it would have been my first failure. The beauty I didn't give you. God had already done that, but everything that can enhance beauty, I did give you--education, culture, social standing of the highest. You have come back home with every exquisite accomplishment that a woman can have. I'm willing to admit that from my point of view you've been a good investment. You have instinctively the perfection that most women only strive after. I'm so proud of you that I've chosen to make you the mistress of my house. What you want you have only to ask for, but you will please remember that I am head of my family. I shall make few demands--and those must be complied with. That is all there is to understand."

"I had understood," she answered very quietly, "that I was to regard this house as my own and that I was to be mistress here. That, you pointed out in your letters, was why I should find it preferable to going to my mother's. Was it not so?"

"If you had gone to mother's, would you have expected to upset the entire schedule of family affairs?" he demanded.

In reply she rose and stood drumming lightly with her fingers on the table-top.

"'Daughter am I in my mother's house, but Mistress in mine own,'" she quoted.

Hamilton Burton took several turns back and forth across the floor. The whole situation was surprising and intolerable. Never had son or brother been more lavish in waving the magician's wand for the pleasure of his family, but never had any other member forgotten for an instant the obedience they owed to his paramount genius. Men who fought him, he could crush, and did crush ruthlessly and with no afterthought, but his own sister, crossing his will, became a problem of more difficult solution.

"It is a trifle whether you breakfast in bed or not," he said suddenly, halting in his walk and standing before her. "It is vital that you remember that you are a girl and that I am the head of this family, whose right and duty it is to direct you. It was I who brought this family out of obscurity and drudgery. But for me you would now be mending some lumberjack's socks and washing his dishes and living in the gray monotony of unvaried days. There has been only one productive member in our household and that is myself. There has been just one who could, with no outside aid, meet the world and conquer it, and the family which I have brought up with me from an abandoned farm to the high places of success must regard my wishes."

"You have summarized with the modesty of a tyrant and a czar," she replied as her eyes suddenly broke into an unexpected fire and her uptilted chin set itself defiantly, "the many favors that your hand of self-made royalty has conferred upon your suppliant family." Her musical voice took on a deeper thrill. "You have reminded me that my father and mother, my brother and myself, are all but parasites that feed upon your so-great powers of achievement. _Eh bien_, you have made a mistake. My mother is a saint--"

"If any one dared to contradict that--" interrupted Hamilton hotly, but she halted him with an imperious wave of her hand.

"If my czar-like brother will permit his sister to address his throne,"

she said with quiet sarcasm, "I shall esteem it a gracious favor. Let us be frank with each other. My mother is a saint and my father a good man.

My brother, Paul, is a genius in music--and a weakling--but, as you say, each of them is without power. Each of them is a parasite and you are the oak upon which they grow and bloom. But as for me--" She stopped and laughed, and suddenly Hamilton Burton realized that his sister Mary was not the child he had always regarded her: not the slip of a girl that had been sent away in the infancy of his fortune to be educated abroad, but a woman of twenty-five, and an unusual woman.

"As for me," she continued slowly, "I think you have made a mistake.

Whence, _mon cher_, came this fire in your soul which told you back there in the barren hills that you were not like little men? May it not be that this genius came to you from some remote ancestor? May it not be that also into my veins crept some of that fire? _Alors!_ Whether that be true or no, this I do of a certainty believe. The spirit of fight that is in you, is likewise in me. You will not find in me the _jeune fille_ who shall obey without knowing why. My feet are small--for which I thank _le bon Dieu_--but I can stand quite stanchly upon them.

You boast of the princely gifts that you have bestowed upon me. For those I am not unthankful, but I shall not regard them as the price of blind obedience. If they have been given in that spirit, you have done for me nothing more than other men have done for--for their mistresses."

She ended and stood very calm in her anger while the brother who had never before been successfully defied gazed into her face with an expression of amazement. Then slowly there came over his own a glow of keen admiration.

He came over and bowed with almost courtly ceremony, then he laughed.

"Mary," he exclaimed, "we shall fight, you and I, but we shall reign together. By God, you are my sister! Not just by coincidence of birth, but by the deeper kinship of our two souls. Great heavens, girl, since I came here to fight and to win, I've been lonely. It's not egotism but truth that makes me say this. I have been a conqueror--and all conquerors are lonely. You are mistress here. Do as you wish." He went back to the safe, but he looked up and laughed in a nave and winning fashion that was quite irresistible.

"By the way," he suggested, "are you going to do me the honor to breakfast with me hereafter?"

The girl laughed, too, and her eyes were as serenely gracious as a queen's may afford to be when, of her own will, she makes a royal concession.

"Yes, I shall breakfast with you, _mon cher_ brother," she replied. Then she added with perfect mimicry of his own overbearing voice, "It's a trifle whether I breakfast in bed or not. It is vital that you remember who is mistress of this house. _C'est moi!_"

A moment later, the man whose frown carried punishment for his adversaries and whose smile was so frank and winning for his friends, stood before his sister, watching her eyes as eagerly as a schoolboy while he opened the satin case and held out to her the string of pearls.

"Mary," he said simply, "I'm not a man that curries favor with women.

Paul looks after that gentle art for this family. You are the only girl I care about. When I give presents to a woman, it will be to you. There is no other woman in New York who could wear that rope of pearls and not look as if the pearls were wearing her. On your throat they are what jewels should always be--a subordinate decoration; partly eclipsed stars. I thought you might like them."

She took the gift and raised it to the light, while her eyes kindled and her lips parted in delight, and as she looked at the pearls, her brother looked at her.

"They are beautiful, aren't they?" she exclaimed and as she gazed at their well-matched perfection a glow kindled in her cheeks.

"With such gifts," she murmured softly, "you could buy the souls of many women, _mon cher_. If you insist on being a master, at least, you are a generous one."

Possibly at that moment, back of her delight, there rose a little ghost-like doubt. He had said, "We shall fight--but we shall reign together." She wondered vaguely how complete would be her participation in that reign. So far as they had fought, each had won a victory and he had paid a handsome indemnity--in future how would it be? Then he took the thing from her and fastened it around her neck and led her very gently to one of the great mirrors, standing at her shoulder and gazing at her through the glass.

"So," she exclaimed, turning and laying her hands on his shoulders while her eyes twinkled with merriment, "they tell me that you compel men to wear your collar. Already, I, too, am wearing it."

"At least," he laughed back at her, "you will always find it as light and pleasant to wear as pearls."

At the door he paused and spoke, with no trace of his former dictatorial authority. His tone was very pleasant and unassuming. "May I make another suggestion?" he asked, and the girl nodded with smiling eyes.

"You are too fine a woman to need theatric affectations, Mary. I am proudest of all that we are unalloyed American in blood. Be American.

Cut out the pidgin English and the interlarding of French idiom and phrases, won't you?"

She raised her brows, and after a moment's pause said, "Certainly. I have no wish to appear affected. It seemed natural. The habit had grown on me, but I shall accept that advice, my dear brother."

CHAPTER VII

Even in the days of his first, forced marches toward fortune, when besides his unshakable plunger's nerve he stood almost without an asset, Hamilton Burton's policy had been that the limelight paid, and as he had mounted from moderate success into the millionaire class, and thence into the division rated in a plurality of millions, he had always adhered to the plan of letting nothing which reflected his personality fall below the standards of superlative worth and cost.

At first, he thought of the conspicuousness of wealth as a credential tending to enlarge the scope and standing of its possessor. In a city whose public is surfeited with a show of splendor, the man who would find himself underscored must pitch such conspicuousness to a scale of rajah-like magnificence.

With a thoroughness born of gigantic gambling instinct Hamilton Burton directed his policy of the outward show and trappings of wealth through every artery of his life and the lives of his family. Yet, because his taste was discriminating and sound, he was able to combine the maximum effect of expenditure with the simplicity of the artistic and to shun the pitfall of the offensive.

In those earlier days when the family was fresh from the frugality of the hills, its elder members had constantly been appalled by the youth's extravagance. Yet, even then, he had overruled them with an autocratic assurance, which knew no doubt. It had not at first been easy for the gentle mother, whose hands were red from decades of tub and dishpan, and the father whose fingers had gripped the plow, to adapt themselves to the idle and effortless regime of this new order.

It had for a long while been impossible for them to escape the fear of a crash in which all this iridescent and artificial seeming must collapse.

But his attitude remained unaltered. "I do not mean to let money be my master," he had obstinately reiterated. "To me it shall be a slave.

Money conquers the man who fears it. It is an insolent, inanimate underling, which, if not treated with contempt, becomes a tyrant. Scorn it and it serves you blindly. I must _seem_ a rich man before I can become one. It is my wish that my family appear the family of a rich man. Economies that are apparent are confessions of failure."

In the first chapters they protested, but Ham swept their protests intolerantly aside, and as the years went on he piled miracle upon miracle until every promise of his unsupported egotism had become an accomplished and undeniable reality. Then they ceased to fear and trusted implicitly in the star that led him. Gradually they yielded to the blandishments of the new life and drifted pleasantly before the breezes of luxury. The man who had been a bearded and Calvinistic countryman for almost a half-century became in less than a decade an ease-loving and slothful old gentleman, dapper of appearance, rosy of face and inclining toward _embonpoint_.

Now it is fundamentally written in the edicts of Truth that a man must go forward or back, and if his hands hang idle at his sides, he will not advance. Thomas Standish Burton was born to buffet the storms of his mountains, and as long as he followed his destiny he could look his fellow-man in the face with the level eyes of independence. Within his limitations, he could think wholesomely and soundly. But here he was a different man, a Samson shorn, and the things which he had first contemptuously waved aside or accepted with a growl in his throat, he now welcomed. The hard brown face was rounded and pink and where there had been rawhide muscles on his torso there was now soft and fatty flesh; for Tom Burton whom men had accounted a giant of immovable resolution back there among the forests was, in these days, a gentleman and wore a gardenia or a carnation in his lapel. It was not originally his fault. The process of becoming a gentleman had pained and irked him, but he had a masterful son who could not afford that his father should wear a shaggy bark, and that masterful son had been suffocating him with opulence until his powers of resistance had become atrophied.

And the mother, too, had altered, though, in her, the change had been a sweeter thing. The making of a lady of this remote descendant of Alexander Hamilton's blood had not been difficult.

Some strains of heredity can awaken from the submerged sleep of relapse as quickly and keenly as a woodsman throws off the mists of slumber.

Ham had never feared that his mother would reveal the taint of the parvenue when she faced the batteries of criticism which guard the outposts of the social world to which his own prominence gave the entree. And Paul, with his gentle love of comfort and his thoughts that strayed into dreams and music, found the perfumed atmosphere of a drawing-room very congenial. He breathed the incense of praise from women who were enraptured as his long fingers stole over the piano keys.

Had his road to artistic recognition lain along the broken trail of struggle, Paul would have fainted, undiscovered, by the wayside, but with every difficulty made smooth before his feet and every puddle carpeted by Hamilton's cloth of gold, he found himself the lionized pet of inner circles and the favorite of the elect.

Of these things Hamilton Burton was thinking as he left his door for the car that awaited him. From the start he had never deviated from his well-laid course of determination. Power was his goal and by power he meant no mean modicum, but limitless strength. He had picked finance as his field of endeavor because in this day the scepter that sways affairs must be the scepter of gold. But Hamilton Burton knew that he was only starting and his plans ran to the future. As he looked ahead he never forgot that the fighter must be well conditioned. With the discipline of the boxer in training, he regulated his habits of personal life and held his splendid nerves steady and above par. No man had ever seen the dimming cloud of dissipation in his eye nor any gossip-monger whispered of unwise indulgence. He was spoken of as fastidiously clean of life, and yet it is doubtful whether any shadow of self-illusion found harbor in his own mind. In morals as a code inspired of conscience he had no interest; in rigid self-restraint from all that might impair the highest efficiency of nerve and brain he was as unyielding as a Trappist. To the mandate of his single deity, Ambition, he clove with unswerving sternness. His lavish generosity to his family was a strong and clannish passion--yet even that was a sort of greater selfishness and all the world outside he held in ruthless disregard--a realm to conquer. That one may conquer, many must fall--and to conquer was his one resolve.

Even now, awaited by several men who were not accustomed to cooling their heels in anterooms, he halted at the curb, when he saw another automobile draw up and recognized his brother Paul.

The younger Burton was not so greatly changed. On his cameo features still lingered the delicate hall-mark of the over-sensitive and about his lips played the petulant expression of one who could not cope with the material. His eyes were still pools of brooding darkness, and as he glanced up and met his brother's smile his expression of pleasure was boyish and spontaneous.