It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. “You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter,” she said. “I settled _that_ to-day.” “I was not sneering at them,” I protested. “I wasn't even thinking of them. And--you must know that it's a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you--Anita!” She made a gesture of impatience. “I see I'd better tell you why I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go.” “I don't care why you refused, or imagined you refused,” said I. “I am content with the fact that you are here.” “But you misunderstand it,” she answered coldly. “I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it,” was my reply. “I accept it.” She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room--you, who love or at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see _Her_ moving about in those rooms of mine. While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. “What if 'they' should include Roebuck!” And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: “I'm going out for a few minutes--perhaps an hour--if any one should ask.” A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's. * * * * * When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth--a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said “rich as Roebuck” where they used to say “rich as Croesus,” he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention.