Her carriage was waiting a block away. Hendricks, the footman, received my order with impassivity and shut us in together with the unconcern of a good servant. It was dark in the carriage, and neither of us spoke as we whirled through the snowy streets. Once the lights of a passing hansom illumined my companion's face and I saw that she was crying. It pleased me to see her suffer; she had cost me eleven weeks of misery; why should she escape scot-free! "Hugo," she said, "are you coming back to us, Hugo?" "I don't know," I said. "Why don't you know?" she asked. "Oh, because!" I said. "That's no answer," she said. There was a pause. "I was beginning to care too much about you," I said. "I think I was beginning to fall in love with you. I've got out of one false position. Why should I blunder into another?" "Would it be a false position to love me?" she said. "Of course that would a good deal depend on you," I said. "Suppose I wanted you to," she said. "Oh, but you couldn't!" I said. "Why couldn't I?" she said. "But forty," I objected; "nobody loves anybody who's forty, you know." "I do," she said, "though, come to think of it, you were thirty- nine--when--when it first happened, Hugo." I put out my arms in the dark and caught her to me. I could not believe my own good fortune as I felt her trembling and crying against my breast. I was humbled and ashamed. It was like a dream. An old fellow like me--forty, you know. "It was a mighty near thing, Teresa," I said. "I guess it was--for me!" she said. "I meant myself, sweetheart," I said. "For both of us then," she said, in a voice between laughter and tears, and impulsively put her arms round my neck. THE AWAKENING OF GEORGE RAYMOND I George Raymond's father had been a rich man, rich in those days before the word millionaire had been invented, and when a modest hundred thousand, lent out at an interest varying from ten to fifteen per cent, brought in an income that placed its possessor on the lower steps of affluence. He was the banker of a small New Jersey town, a man of portentous respectability, who proffered two fingers to his poorer clients and spoke about the weather as though it belonged to him. When the school-children read of Croesus in their mythology, it was Jacob Raymond they saw in their mind's eye; such expressions as "rich beyond the dreams of avarice" suggested him as inevitably as pumpkin did pie; they wondered doubtfully about him in church when that unfortunate matter of the camel was brought up with its attendant difficulties for the wealthy. Even Captain Kidd's treasure, in those times so actively sought for along the whole stretch of the New England coast, conjured up a small brick building with "Jacob Raymond, Banker" in gilt letters above the lintel of the door.