snobberies of van Tuiver's world, it was none the less true that she
believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me
as I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social
graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The
rich needed it--even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud
Castlemans of Castleman County had needed it also?

If that guess at her inmost soul was correct, then what a drama was
her meeting with me! A person who despised money, who had proven it
by grim deeds--and this a person of her own money-worshipping sex!
What was the meaning of this phenomenon--this new religion that was
challenging the priesthood of Mammon? So some Roman consul's
daughter might have sat in her father's palace, and questioned in
wonder a Christian slave woman, destined ere long to face the lions
in the arena.

The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in
this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl
had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since
begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were
rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by
charity to the poor. As we sat and talked, she knew this one thing
quite definitely--that I had a religion, and she had none. That was
the reason for the excitement which possessed her.

Nor was that fact ever out of my own mind for a moment. As she sat
there in her sun-flooded morning-room, clad in an exquisite
embroidered robe of pink Japanese silk, she was such a lovely thing
that I was ready to cry out for joy of her; and yet there was
something within me, grim and relentless, that sat on guard, warning