I have to admit that we followed their example. Anything served as an excuse for it, the dogs and the children doing the same from a similar instinct. I got the impression, too, that my companion was less in the throes of the discretion we had imposed upon ourselves, for the reason that his term as a mere educational lackey was drawing to a close. It had, in fact, only two more days to run. Then August would come and he would desert us. As it might be my last opportunity to surprise him into looking at me in the way Mrs. Rossiter had observed, I kept my eye on him pretty closely. I cannot say that I detected any change that flattered me. Tall and straight and splendidly poised, he was as smilingly impenetrable as ever. Like Howard Brokenshire, he betrayed no wound, even if I had inflicted one. It was a little exasperating. I was more than piqued. I told him I hadn't heard of his return from New York and asked how he had fared. His reply was enthusiastic. He had seen Stacy Grainger and was eager to be his henchman. "He's got that about him," he declared, "that would make anybody glad to work for him." He described his personal appearance, brawny and spare with the attributes of race. It was an odd comment on the laws of heredity that his grandfather was said to have begun life as a peddler, and yet there he was a _grand seigneur_ to the finger-tips. I said that Howard Brokenshire was also a _grand seigneur_, to which he replied that Howard Brokenshire was a monument. American conditions had raised him, and on those conditions he stood as a statue on its pedestal. His position was so secure that all he had to do was stand. It was for this reason that he could be so dictatorial. He was safely fastened to his base; nothing short of seismic convulsion of the whole economic world was likely to knock him off. In the course of that conversation I learned more of the origin of the Brokenshire fortunes than I had ever before heard. It was the great-grandfather of J. Howard who apparently had laid the foundation-stone on which later generations built so well. That patriarch, so I understood, had been a farmer in the Connecticut Valley. His method of finance was no more esoteric than that of lending out small sums of money at a high rate of interest. Occasionally he took mortgages on his neighbors' farms, with the result that he became in time something of a landed proprietor. When the suburbs of a city had spread over one of the possessions thus acquired, the foundation-stone to which I have referred might have been considered well and truly laid. About the year 1830, his son migrated to New York. The firm of Meek & Brokenshire, of which the fame was to go through two continents, was founded when Van Buren was in the presidential seat and Victoria just coming to the throne. It seems there was a Meek in those days, though at the time of which I am writing nothing remained of him but a syllable.