Nevertheless he was relieved to be free from their presence. He felt that it was well that their legitimate business--one as a stock-broker, the other a real-estate agent--held them to their desks in the city of Bretonville. The manifest purpose of their creation, he thought, was fully served in their furnishing forth their quota of the sinews of war. He was much younger than either, but he had learned something beyond their knowledge in this internecine strife, and when it became necessary to provide for them occupation, to prevent further interference in the venture which had come to be of most hopeful interest to both, he wrote to them touching the finding of a suitable man to keep the hotel when built, certain that in this quest for a Boniface he had set them by the ears, and relying on their different temperaments to keep them wrangling together and to leave him in peace. Every sylvan detail of the scene pleased his artistic and receptive sense, as he stood on the great natural terrace, the site of the future building, and surveyed the landscape. It was a phenomenally felicitous opportunity. This plateau projected from a lateral spur of the Great Smoky chain, and faced the southeast. Thus the main body of the mountain range, diagonally across the Cove, seemed strangely near at hand; one could study its chasms and abysses, its jungles of laurel and vast forests, as it were from mid-air; it was the point of view of a bird. Through a gap lower down, the parallel lines of the eastern ranges became visible, elsewhere hidden by the great boundary ridge,--a wonderful fantasy painted in every gradation of blue, from the slaty grayish hue near at hand under the shadow of a cloud, the velvet-like tones of ultramarine beyond, and still further the metallic hardness of tint as of lapis lazuli, till the most delicate azure outline of peaks faintly obliterated its identity against the azure eastern sky. All unflushed the sky was here, although to the right the clouds were red above the western mountains. They closely hemmed in the Cove, heavy, massive, purple and bronze and deeply green, in such limited latitude of color as their lowering shadows would permit. Far down their slopes the river ran, threading the deep forests with elusive steely glimmers. He could not hear its voice, but from great cliffs hard by the silvery melody of the mineral springs beat upon the air with a rhythm inexpressibly sweet and wild and alluring. So definite it was that it seemed odd that one did not "catch the tune." In an open space some scattered sheep were feeding,--the effect pastoral and pictorial. The whole scene, with its blended solemnity and beauty and dignity, would well accord with the castellated edifice his fancy had set in its midst. It might indeed be a mediæval world upon which the windows should look, instead of the prosaic nineteenth century, so far it would appear from sordid to-day, so well would the fashion