A small, slight man was Mr. Lispenard, very erect, very straight of eyebrow, keen of glance, precise of speech. His extraordinary black eyes peered out from beneath his level brows in a disquietingly observant manner. One felt immediately that one's hands and feet were peculiarly large and awkward, or one's last remark hopelessly banal, or one's birthplace in some cheap and innominate region outside of Manhattan. So long as Miss Wardrop remained under forty, Mr. Lispenard had held aloof. Perhaps he feared that by calling on a maiden lady under forty he might arouse hopes which, however chaste, could not, in the nature of things, be fulfilled, he being what he was, a Knickerbocker. But after this danger mark was past, and perhaps stimulated by the removal of almost the last of the other patriarchal residents of the Square, he called one New Year's afternoon, and gravely presented the compliments of the season to the woman to whom he now spoke for the first time in his life. There was nothing vindictive about Miss Wardrop. She appreciated his viewpoint, and bade him welcome as naturally as though they had been friends for years. And thereafter Mr. Lispenard was an irregular but always gladly received caller in the parlor separated from his own by little more than twelve inches of brick and mortar. In the days when Miss Mary was growing up to childhood, Mr. Lispenard had been one of those who had marched down Broadway in 1861, not to return for four long years. South of the Potomac he had acquired many vivid and remarkable experiences of which no one had ever heard him speak, and also a pension, incredibly small, which he received in silent dignity each month and equally without comment turned over to a rascally body servant who had run away from more battles than one would have conceived to be possible. This sturdy retainer, having served a short time in Mr. Lispenard's troop and performed him some trifling services, had ten years after the war turned up with a calm and most surprising assumption of his old commander's responsibility for his entire existence, and since that time had lived on his ex-lieutenant's bounty. One of the chief attractions, in Helen's eyes, of her aunt's old house in Washington Square was the chance of a call or two from Mr. Lispenard. After her third or fourth visit he grew friendly with her, in fact vastly more friendly than he ever became with her aunt. And she, for her part, found this elderly aristocrat all the more fascinating for finding him in New York, through the rushing progressiveness of which he seemed to move in a kind of stately, romantic twilight. "My dear child," were her aunt's first words after Helen's latest arrival, "you have missed by a single day a call from our next-door neighbor." "Well, if he doesn't come again," replied the girl, with a smile, "I'll scandalize the dear old man nearly to death by going and calling on him myself."