In the Academy at Venice is that famous picture of Titian's representing the little Virgin climbing up the steps of the Temple, a pathetic, frightened figure bearing no trace of the supreme radiance that was to be hers. There was something of the same religious awe in Kedzie's heart as she mounted the steps of the house that was a temple in her religion. She was going up to her heaven already. It was perfection because it was the next thing. When Kedzie reaches the scriptural heaven, if she does (and it will be hard for Anybody to deny her anything that she sets her heart on), she will be happy till she gets there and finds that she is only in the first of the seven heavens. But what will the poor girl do when she goes on up and up and up and learns at last that there is no eighth? She will weep like another Alexander the Great, because there are no more heavens to hope for. Jim led her into the best room there was up-stairs, and told her that a duke had slept there. At first she was thrilled through. Later it would occur to her, not tragically, yet a bit quellingly, that, after all, she had not married a duke herself, but only a commoner. She had as much right to a title as any other American girl. A foreign title is part of a Yankee woman's birthright. Hundreds of women had acquired theirs. Kedzie got only a plain “Mr.” Still, she told herself that she must not be too critical, and she let her enthusiasm fly. She did not have to pose before Jim, and she ran about the suite as about a garden. CHAPTER VIII Kedzie was smitten with two facts: the canopied bed was raised on a platform, and the marble bath-tub was sunk in the floor. She sat on the bed and bounced up and down on the springs. She stared up at the tasseled baldachin with its furled draperies, and fingered the lace covering and the silken comforter. She sat in the best chairs, studied the dressing-table with its royal equipment. She went to the window and gazed out into Fifth Avenue, reviewing its slow-flowing lava of humanity--young royalty overlooking her subjects. Mrs. Abby, the housekeeper, knocked and came in to be presented to the new Princess of Wales, and to present the personal maid who had been assigned to her. Even Mrs. Dyckman was afraid of Mrs. Abby, who lacked the suavities of Wotton. Mrs. Abby gave Kedzie the chill of her life, and Kedzie responded with an ardent hatred. The maid, a young Frenchwoman, found her black dress with its black silk apron an appropriate uniform, since her father, three brothers, a dozen cousins, and two or three of her sweethearts were at the wars. Some of them were dead, she knew, and the others were on their way along the red stream that was bleeding France white, according to German hopes.