There were two of them: the First National, familiarly known as the White Bank, and a private bank, known as the Grey Bank, and they stood side by side in the same imposing block, with marble front and massive doors of oak, and broad granite steps. High up in the cornice was an inscription telling that the building had been erected in 1875 by Robert White, Esq. He would like to have had Judge Robert White, instead of Robert White, Esq., so proud was he of the title held for a year only, and for which he was indebted to the resignation of an intimate friend and the influence of money. But his wife dissuaded him from it, but could not keep off the “Esq.” He was both a judge and a ‘squire, he said, having held the office of Justice of the Peace for two terms, and being called ‘squire before he became a judge, and one of the titles should go down to posterity. He was a weak man, and a proud man; weak in judgment and common sense, and very proud of his birth as son of a General and grandson of a Governor, with a line of ancestry dating back nearly to the flood. He was proud, too, of his money, and his house, the finest in Merivale, and his handsome grounds, and of his marble block, the third floor of which was occupied by a Masonic lodge, the second by law offices and club-rooms, and the first by the two banks. Of one of them—the National—he was president, and that fact added to his high opinion of himself as the first man in Merivale. “Yes, my boy—the first man in Merivale, and don’t you forget it, or that you are my son—the grandson of a General and the great grandson of a Governor, with all sorts of high blood behind them,” he said to his only son and heir, Herbert. “Pick the best there is in society or none,” was his injunction, and by the best he meant those with the most money, without reference to character or morals. In some respects Herbert was a son worthy of his father, and when a lad, had built a wall of reserve between himself and the boys whom he thought second-class in the Merivale High School. With the girls, however, it was different, and when Louie Grey’s bright brown eyes looked fearlessly at him, and when Louie called him a blockhead because he failed to work out a simple problem in algebra upon the blackboard, and then, to make amends, whispered to him the answer to a question in history over which he was hopelessly floundering, he forgot the White blood of which his father had taught him to be so proud—forgot his pedigree, and went over the wall to meet the young girl with the brown eyes and hair, who had no pedigree, so far as he knew, and who certainly had no money.