Miss Beard drew herself up with that offended dignity which only an American woman of the “very best class” can exhibit in perfection when you suspect her of an acquaintance with a person moving in a social grade less exalted than the sphere she herself revolves in. “I don’t _know_ her,” she said, markedly, “but I know, of course, who she is. She’s the widow of Palmer—the well-known Palmer—the notorious Palmer, who—but there!—you’ve been in the States; you must know all about him.” “Not Palmer the murderer!” Florian exclaimed in surprise. “She’s too young for that, surely.” “No; _not_ Palmer the murderer,” Miss Beard responded in a very shrill voice with considerable acerbity. “_He_ was at least a _gentleman_. I can’t say as much for this lady’s husband. She’s the widow of Palmer, the dry-goodsman in Broadway.” “Oh, indeed,” Florian cried, deeply interested in this discovery—for it meant much money. “I remember the place well—a palatial building in the Renaissance style at the corner of a street near the junction with Fifth Avenue. These princes of commerce in your Western world represent in our midst to-day the great signiors of the Adriatic who held the gorgeous East in fee, and whose Gothic façades, rich in arch and tracery, still line the long curve of the Grand Canal for us. They are the satraps of finance. The world in our times is ruled once more—as in Venice of old, in the heyday of its splendour—by the signet-ring of the merchant. Palmer was one of these—a paladin of silken bales, a Doge Dandolo of Manhattan, a potentate in the crowded marts of the Samarcand of the Occident.” “I don’t know what you mean,” Miss Beard retorted in an acrid tone, eyeing him sternly through her _pince-nez_, “but I say he was a dry-goodsman.” Florian descended at a bound from the open empyrean to the solid earth of commonplace. “Well, at any rate, he was rich,” he said, letting the paladins slide. “He must have died worth millions.” “His estate was proved,” Miss Beard said, curtly, “at a sum in dollars which totals out—let me see—fives into 35—ah, yes, to exactly seven hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds sterling.” Florian gave a little gasp. “That’ll do,” he said, with slow emphasis. “And he left it?” he suggested, after a second’s pause, with an interrogative raising of his broad white forehead. “And he left it, every cent,” Miss Beard responded, “without deduction of any sort, to that fly-away little inanity.” Florian drew a deep breath. “Then she’s rich,” he said, musing; “rich beyond the utmost dreams of avarice.”