"Why? You are fully dressed, are you not?"

"Assuredly."

"Then what reason can you have for refusing to come when I ask it? Is it simply that you wish to defy me? I am not accustomed to being disobeyed."

"Are you then so sure of obedience, _mon cher_?" She raised her gorgeous eyes and laughed up at him with indulgent amusement. Her manner was that of a young empress who regards any criticism of herself as an audacious jest, so unprecedented as to be diverting. "Are you sure that you have nothing yet to learn? I said I should not come down to the breakfast-room--because I did not wish to come."

"You mean that you still refuse?"

"If you desire to call it that. I would not seem ungracious.... I should prefer the word 'decline.'"

"Then that is reason enough why you _are_ coming."

Mary lifted her brows in incredulous amusement, but Hamilton Burton did not smile in response. He came a step nearer her chair and said very quietly: "While you are in my house I wish you to appear at the breakfast-table. This morning is a good time to begin. Will you accompany me on your own feet, or will you make your initial appearance kicking those same feet, while I carry you down like a child in a tantrum? There are about five seconds available for you to give the question mature deliberation."

"Thank you, _cheri_." Her mirthful pupils were not flecked with annoyance. "Five seconds are four seconds more than I need. I shall not go either way."

Hamilton made no further comment. With the apparent ease of one taking up a child from its cradle, he bent down and gathered her slender figure in his arms, then, lifting her bodily from her chair, he turned toward the door.

For an instant, she lay against his shoulder, too astounded for protest.

Then her satin slippers began beating a furious tattoo and her small fists pummeling him as her cheeks flamed and her mismatched eyes burst into indignant fire. These demonstrations her brother ignored as he carried her in effortless fashion out into the broad hall and half-way down the stairs. She had ceased to struggle by that time and was gasping in wordless wrath. But at the turn of the stairway into the lower hall he paused and stood still, while their eyes met and locked in a brief, hot duel of wills.

"Now," he inquired calmly, "shall this be the manner of your first appearance before my secretary and butler, or will you make the rest of the journey on your own power?"

For the first time she recovered her voice. It was a wild mingling of frustrated wrath and outraged dignity, and for once she found that her fluency had forsaken her. She had been taught--Hamilton had seen to that--that when she spoke others should obey. She had not yet learned to bow to even his autocracy.

"_Ham!_" she exclaimed tensely, though even now she spoke in a cautious voice so that no echo might reach other ears. "Put me down! How dare you?"

He did not answer the question; instead he asked another.

"Will you enter as mistress of the house or will you go in kicking?"

During a long defiant pause, their eyes held, both pairs unwavering; then the girl said quietly: "I'll go in myself."

CHAPTER VI

Harrow had not overstated the facts when he said that it had been his privilege to serve in families "where niceties were highly regarded." He was the accomplished servant, seeing and hearing only such things as his betters intended for his eyes and ears. If he had human emotions he ordinarily revealed them only when his livery was doffed. Yet even the impeccably correct serving man has his moments of weakness, and, as Hamilton Burton left the room, he muttered low, but quite audibly, "My God!" Then, feeling Carl Bristoll's chilling glance upon him, he sought to cover his indiscretion in an apologetic cough.

But the secretary himself felt the disturbing uneasiness that had prompted that exclamation. Hamilton Burton had been defied, and when that occurred peace fled and punishment fell.

Evidently the girl upstairs, the girl just returned from years of study and travel in Europe, had something of that same spirit which made her brother's will a thing of adamant, but she had not done well to begin her new life by measuring lances with the autocratic Hamilton. Probably at the moment she was being reprimanded, perhaps rebuked into tears which, since she was young and beautiful, became a disquieting thought.

Carl Bristoll felt the discomfort of the outsider in the shadow of a family scene.

He would now have to meet Mary Burton under the most inauspicious circumstances, and she would always remember that he had first seen her with tear-stained eyes at a moment of humiliation and defeat. It was too much to expect that a woman could forget this, and the young secretary had the wish that it should be otherwise. So he sat rather moodily contemplating his plate and when he heard steps on the stairs he was surprised at the brevity of the interval. Hamilton Burton had evidently subdued this insurrection in his household with the same whirlwind swiftness that he employed toward enemies beyond his walls.

Bristoll saw the young financier draw back the portieres and he himself rose hastily and came forward, but he halted half-way and stood transfixed. He had been told that he was to expect beauty, and he had expected it, yet now for the moment he found himself standing astonished, and as devoid as a raw schoolboy of his usually imperturbable poise. From this trance-like condition he was recalled by the quizzical amusement of his employer and, bowing from the hips, he found himself murmuring some well-bred inanity.

The girl standing there in the door was a sight to make men gasp and lose their tongues, and because this was not the first who had done so, her own perfect lips curved into a smile of purest graciousness, and in her voice as she spoke was a quality of zylophone music made the more charming by that slight French accent which years abroad had given her.

Beauty is so variant of type, so often vaunted and so rarely found in true perfectness, that Carl Bristoll had accepted the newspaper reports of this girl's loveliness with a discounted credence. Now he was convinced. The quality of her coloring and expression would have made her face beautiful even had it lacked its allurement of line and delicacy of proportion; even had the chin tilted less regally and the eyes looked out under their long lashes with less serene queenliness, though ready to twinkle at the instant into the merriment of a mischief-loving child.

She was tall, but not too tall, lithe and slim and sinuous as a mermaid, yet well enough rounded to make each delicate curve a charm, not merely of promise but of fulfilment. She wore a flowing morning-gown that made negligee seem to the suddenly intoxicated secretary the glorified costume for a woman. It was a richly embroidered thing from China and on her head was a crown of lace. Bristoll knew that its material name would be a boudoir cap, but on her head it became a crown--no, it was too filmy and ethereal for that: rather it was a sort of halo. Beneath it, and imprisoning pale fire in its amber softness, escaped a truant mass of curls. From the cap to the foamy whiteness of a lacy petticoat that peeped out just above the silk-clad ankles, she was exquisite. And all these things stamped themselves on young Carl Bristoll's brain as he bowed. Then he realized the delicate white-and-pink glow of her complexion and a marvelous pair of mismated eyes.

Later when trying to defend to his own sophisticated mind his unaccountable loss of poise, he assured himself that it was these eyes.

They should have spoiled her beauty, just as any other thing that destroyed symmetry of balance in form or color would have marred the effect. Yet, on the contrary, they were gorgeous and wonderful, and when he looked at them he felt as if he had plunged into some icy pool and come out glowing.

"It is a pleasure indeed, Mr. Bristoll," she smiled when he had been presented. "You see we must be good and informal friends since the--"

she shrugged her slim shoulders and quite unconsciously fell into French idiom as she continued--"since the so great impatience of my big brother compels me to meet you like this--all untidy and unprepared." She made a little gesture with both hands and her rippling laugh seemed to envelop the young secretary with a deep sense of obligation for her graciousness. "I have been so long from America, and I have not yet come back to the American ways. In France they do not so rush from their beds to their business. In France they take the time to live."

In Hamilton Burton's face there remained no echo of the impatience of a few minutes past. In his serene eyes was no hint of remembered annoyance. As he drew back his sister's chair, one saw in his masterful face only the satisfied pride of a man fastidious of taste in all things from neck-scarfs to women.

"I'm truly sorry, Mary," he declared, "to have inconvenienced you, but you must let me be a little selfish. The only time I can be sure of seeing you will be across the breakfast-table, and that privilege you must grant--because you are too delectable a sister to do without."

"Ah," she laughed, "but I did not know that here in America the men knew how to say the pretty things--and to their own sisters, too! But it is for me to apologize. It is I who let the coffee grow cold. I have been spoiled abroad where people are very lazy." Under her smiling eyes the two men sat content while she made of serving the Bolivian coffee a ceremonial as pretty as a fete.

Young Bristoll, usually loquacious enough, was not talkative this morning. What had happened to more hardened philanderers abroad was happening to him, and the shield which he had always succeeded in holding safely before his heart was being lowered under the bright archery of Mary Burton's eyes.

At last he rose, and his chief said quietly, "Carl, I shall be an hour late. Will you run down to the office and sit on the lid until I get there?"

The secretary's brows went up. "You were to meet several of the directors of the Inter-Ocean Coal and Ore at ten-fifteen," he reminded.

"Let them wait," retorted Burton placidly. "I'm usually punctual enough."

"Ah!" exclaimed Mary with an adorable show of penitence, "and it is I who am causing Monsieur Coal and Monsieur Ore to wait--I am so sorry!"

But, when Bristoll had gone and Hamilton had led the way into the library, safe from the overhearing of the servants, the girl's manner abruptly changed. She stood by the broad desk, resting her slender fingers lightly on the mahogany top, and turned to her brother. Her attitude was very straight and regal, and her voice, though still soft and musical, had in it the quiet ring of defiance.

"So!" she said. "So, in my brother's house I come and go under orders?

So, I rise when he commands it and go to bed at his direction."

Hamilton Burton paused with his fingers on the knob of a wall-safe from which he had meant to take a package that he had placed there as a gift in celebration of her home-coming. It had pleased him, as he was shown that rope of splendidly matched pearls in the establishment of the continent's premier jeweller, that he was able to buy such gifts. Of the twenty millions of families in America, nineteen million would have regarded their cost as a large fortune upon whose income they could live at ease while life lasted. But Hamilton Burton had been even prouder that on his sister's throat their beauty would after all be the secondary beauty, and with the eye of the connoisseur he had rejected several of the graduated gems and demanded that in their place more perfect ones be substituted. Agents of the great house, skilled in the nuances of selection, had sought far to better them until the result was satisfactory to the exacting taste of the purchaser.

Hamilton Burton was spoken of as a woman-hater. Society saw him rarely.

Power was his mistress and success his passion. His egotism, centering on no deep love of his own and too fastidious for mere "affairs," left him opportunity for an exaggerated family pride.

Now he halted with his fingers on the combination knob of the safe and straightened up. The sun fell upon a face very attractive and winning, and a figure very strong and graceful, but at the same moment the features hardened and the eyes wore their fighting glint.

"Mary," he said very slowly, "I thought that you understood. I thought from the way you spoke in there that you realized it was you who had acted like a very lovely and a very selfish little pig."

"Did you suppose then," she queried as her chin went a shade higher and the long lashes dropped a little over the vivid eyes, "that I should make a scene before your servants?"

"If you include Mr. Bristoll in that category, I must ask you to correct your impression. Carl is my closest friend. A man who happens to stand on an eminence has few such friends and he values those he has."

"Mr. Bristoll seemed to me"--she shrugged her shoulders and spread her palms--"what shall I say--a nice boy? Yet I should hardly have discussed in his presence such matters as we have now to discuss. It seems, _mon cher_, that we do not yet quite understand each other. Is it not so?"