Alban, of course, was sublimely unconscious of this. He had been conducted to an enormous bedroom on the first floor, superbly furnished with old Chippendale and excellent modern Sevres--and there he had been left to realize for the first time that he was alone and that all which had happened since yesterday was not a dream but a hard invincible truth so full of meaning, so wonderful, so sure that the eyes of his brain did not dare to look at it unflinchingly. Boyishly and with a boy's gesture he had thrown himself upon the bed and hidden his face from the light as though the very atmosphere of this wonder world were insupportable. Good God, that it should have happened to him, Alban Kennedy; that it should have been spoken of as his just right; that he should have been told that he had a claim which none might refute! A hundred guesses afforded no clue to the solution of the mystery. He could not tell himself that he was in some way related to Richard Gessner, the banker; he could not believe that his dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle--beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the City Beautiful of his dreams. He rose from the bed at length, and trying to put every thought but that of the moment from his head, he remembered that he was expected to dine alone in the great room below, and to dress himself for such an ordeal in the clothes which the reverend gentleman's wit had provided for him. Courageous in all things, he found himself not a little afraid of all the beautiful objects which he touched, afraid to lift the Sevres pitcher, afraid to open the long doors of the inlaid wardrobe, timid before the dazzling mirror--a reluctant guest who, for the time being, would have been thankful to escape to a carpetless floor and glad to wash in a basin of the commonest kind. When this passed, and it was but momentary, the delusion that a trick was being played upon him succeeded to it and he stood to ask himself if he had not been a fool to believe their story at all, a fool thus to be made sport of by one who would relate the circumstance with relish to-morrow. This piece of nonsense, however, was as quick to give way to the somewhat cynical common sense with which, Alban Kennedy had rightly been credited as the other. He turned from it impatiently and began to dress himself. He had last dressed in black clothes and a white waistcoat for a school concert at Westminster when he was quite a little lad--but his youth had taught him the conventions, and he had never forgotten those traditions of what his dead father used to call the "decent life." In his case the experience