Mrs. Gilderman was Dr. and Mrs. Caiaphas's daughter Florence--their eldest girl, and perhaps the best-beloved by the doctor of all the children. She had been married now a little over a year, during nearly all of which time she and her husband had lived abroad. Gilderman was one of the richest men in the world. His grandfather had laid the foundation of that great Gilderman estate of the present generation, and his father had built well upon the foundation that the first Gilderman had laid. Gilderman had been born into all this great wealth--so great that, perhaps, no man could realize how vast it was. To be born into such a fortune is almost as to be born into royalty. It shuts the inheritor into a shell of circumstances from which there is no escape. Such a man as Gilderman must live his life after a certain routine and in a certain way from which there is no escape. There was no privacy in his life, for all the world looked on and saw what he did. His business of life was to spend money and to enjoy himself. For that purpose, and for that purpose alone, he was born into the world. He had a house in the metropolis, another at the nation's capital, and still another where the Romans of his class spent the torrid weather of summer. Each of these was a palace, and each was filled with gems of art and rare pieces of china, plate, tapestries, and bric-à-brac that his agents had collected for him from all parts of the world. He had given a hundred and sixty thousand dollars for a single painting, and after it was hung he had, perhaps, hardly looked at it. When he travelled he had a valet to look after him, and to foresee and to fulfil his wishes. He hardly did anything for himself--not even to order a cab or to purchase a railroad-ticket. Other attendants looked after the heaps of luggage which he took with him when he travelled. He had his _avant-courier_ to prepare soft places for him in which to lodge, and others remained behind to close the places which he left. Now that he was married, his wife--who had fallen very pliantly into her new life, as women do--must also have a maid to accompany her wherever she went. They would almost fill the private car in which they nearly always travelled if they had any distance to go, especially if they travelled upon any of the railroads which Gilderman controlled. There was no escape from this routine. Even when Gilderman would seek to change the monotonous smoothness of his existence with a taste of something rougher--say of the mountains--it was only a pretended roughness covering over the same perpetual smoothness and softness of life. His log-hut in the wilderness was a palace masquerading as a hut of logs. Everything was really soft and warm; the furniture was an artificial reproduction of something rough; the floors were spread with skins of wild beasts that cost three or four or five hundred dollars apiece; there was an open fireplace that was designed and built by