Edward Floyd-Rosney in some sort habitually confused cause and effect. In his normal entourage he mistook the swift potencies of his wealth, waiting on his will, like a conjurer’s magic, for an individual endowment of ability. He had great faith in his management. In every group of business men with whom his affairs brought him in contact his financial weight gave him a predominance and an influence which flattered his vanity, and which he interpreted as personal tribute, and yet he did not disassociate in his mind his identity from his income. His wealth was an integral part of him, one of the many great values attached to his personality--he felt that he was wise and witty, capable and coercive. He addressed himself to the manipulation of a difficult situation with a certainty of success that gave a momentum to the force with which his money carried all before him. So rarely had he been placed on a level with other men, in a position in which wealth and influence were inoperative, that he had had scant opportunities to appraise his own mental processes--his judgment, his initiative, his powers of ratiocination. He did not feel like a fool when Randal Ducie walked deliberately into the hall of his fathers, staring in responsive surprise to see the Floyd-Rosneys still lingering there. That admission was impossible to Floyd-Rosney’s temperament. He felt as if contemplating some revulsion of nature. He had seen this man among the crowd, boarding the steamer, and lo, here he was again, on dry land and the boat now miles distant. He stood stultified, all his plans for the avoidance of Ducie strangely dislocated and set at naught by the unexpected falling out of events. He was not calculated to bear tamely any crossing of his will, and the blood began to throb heavily in his temples with the realization that his wife had understood his clumsy maneuver, of which she was the subject, and witnessed its ludicrous discomfiture. His pride would not suffer him to glance toward her, where she sat perched up on the grand staircase, in the attitude of a coquettish girl. He curtly addressed Ducie: “Thought you were gone!” “No,” said Ducie, almost interrogatively, as to why this conclusion. Floyd-Rosney responded to the intonation. “I saw you going down to the landing.” “To see my brother off.” “Oh,--ah----” What more obvious--what more natural? The one resumed his interrupted journey, and the other was to take up his usual course of life. That is, thought Floyd-Rosney, if this one is Randal Ducie. But, for some reason, they might have reversed the program, and this is the other one.