The room in which he sat was large and pretentious, but when it had been furnished there had been no lady of good family accustomed to the furnishings of wealth and culture, and with an artistic taste gained in travel at home and abroad, to superintend the selection of these pictures, this carpet, and the coverings of this furniture! He laughed within himself as he sat, his fur cape on his knees and his silk hat in his hand, and he was so elated and pleased with the knowledge of the superiority of Mrs. Cliff's home over this house of the proud city people who had so long looked down upon Plainton, that he entirely forgot his intention of recalling, as he sat in the fine parlor of the Buskirks, the olden times when he used to get up early in the morning and swab the deck. "These people ought to come down and see Mrs. Cliff's house," thought Burke, "and I'll make them do it if I can!" When Mrs. Buskirk, a lady who had always found it necessary to place strong guards around her social position, made her appearance, she received her visitor with an attentive civility. She had been impressed by his appearance when she had seen him grandly careering in his barouche or his sleigh, and she was still more impressed as she saw him in her parlor with additional furs. She had heard he had been a sailor, but now as she talked to him, the belief grew upon her that he might yet make a very good sailor. He was courteous, entirely at his ease, and perhaps a little too bland, and Mrs. Buskirk thought that although her husband might like to sit and smoke with this well-dressed, sun-burned man, he was not a person very desirable for the society of herself and daughters. But she was willing to sit and talk to Mr. Burke, for she wanted to ask him some questions about Mrs. Cliff. She had heard about that lady's new house, or rather the improvement to her old one, and she had driven past it, and she did not altogether understand the state of affairs. She had known that Mrs. Cliff was a widow of a storekeeper of the town, and that she had come into possession of a portion of a treasure which had been discovered somewhere in the West Indies or South America, but those portions of treasures which might be allotted to the widow of a storekeeper in a little country town were not likely to be very much, and Mrs. Buskirk was anxious to know something definite about Mrs. Cliff's present circumstances. Burke felt a little embarrassed in regard to his answers. He knew that Mrs. Cliff was very anxious not to appear as a millionnaire in the midst of the friends and associations of her native town,--at least, that she did not desire to do so until her real financial position had been gradually understood and accepted. Nothing she would dislike so much as to be regarded as the people in her social circle regarded the Buskirks on the hill.