“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are lucky not to have you in overalls and mining-boots--or don’t you wear mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you won’t have any chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will monopolize you.” “What is he going to do to me; fire me?” The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe you _are_ going to be ‘fired.’” “That is a nice, comforting thing to be told--just before dinner!” he laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me about yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?” “Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?” “Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going to marry him.” “When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the wedding--for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old Middleboro. Won’t that console you?” “I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me that way, and the Cumberleigh occasion will be both, from my point of view.” There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles, to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy. At the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions digs between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David Vallory. “Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness. “Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to include the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering what it means to you, individually.” “I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder. “Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run away from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay figures in the stage-setting. Can you understand that?” Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was not the first time that she had let him see that the quick-witted, clear-sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only overlaid, and not spoiled, by the lavishnesses. “I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.” The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation. It was the young woman who seized and made use of it.