"But one thing is certain; I shall stick to my resolution not to tell her that I have made money, and have reformed my old, loose ways of living and doing business. All that I am going to keep as a sort of saving fund that I can draw on when I feel like it, and let it alone when I don't feel like it. We are going to travel,--she is wild on that point,--and she expects to pay the piper. She can't do it, but I shall let her think she's doing it. She takes me for a rattling scapegrace, and I needn't put on the sober and respectable unless I choose to; and when I do choose it will be a big card in my hand. By George! sir, I know Calthea so well that I can twist her around my finger, and I am not sure, if I had got the other one, that I could have done that. It's much more likely that I should have been the twisted one." "What is Miss Rose going to do about her business?" asked Lodloe. "Oh, that's to be wound up with a jerk," answered his companion. "I've settled all that. She wanted to hire somebody to take charge of the store while we're gone, and to sell out the things on her old plan; but that's all tomfoolery. I have engaged a shopkeeper at Romney to come out and buy the whole stock at retail price, and I gave him the money to do it with. That's good business, you know, because it's the same as money coming back to me, and as for the old oddments, and remnants, and endments of faded braids and rotten calicoes, it's a clear profit to be rid of them. If the Romney man sends them to be ground up at the paper-mill, he may pay himself for the cartage and his time. So the shop will be shut day after to-morrow, and you can see for yourself that my style of business is going to be of the stern, practical sort; and, after all, I don't see any better outlook for a fellow than to live a married life in which very little is expected of him, while he knows that he has on tap a good bank-account and a first-class moral character." The autumn was a very pleasant one, and as there was no reason for doing anything else, the guests at the Squirrel Inn remained until late in the season. Therefore it was that Miss Calthea was enabled to marry and start off on her wedding tour before the engaged couples at the inn had returned to the city, or had even fixed the dates for their weddings. Calthea was not a woman who would allow herself to be left behind in matters of this nature. From her general loftiness and serenity of manner, and the perfect ease and satisfaction with which she talked of her plans and prospects with her friends and acquaintances, no one could have imagined that she had ever departed from her original intention of becoming Mrs. Lanigan Beam.