They lived in their ancient houses and went abroad and summered in some simple old-time hamlet hallowed by the headstones of their grandsires, and existed as meaninglessly and blamelessly as the old catalpa trees spreading above their dooryards.
And into this narrow circle Louis Neville and his sister Lily had been born.
It had been a shock to her parents when Lily married Gordon Collis, a mining engineer from Denver.

She came to see them with her husband every year; Collis loved her enough to endure it.
As for Louis' career, his achievements, his work, they regarded it without approval.

Their last great painters had been Bierstadt and Hart, their last great sculptor, Powers.

Blankly they gazed upon the splendours of the mural symphonies achieved by the son and heir of all the Nevilles; they could not comprehend the art of the Uitlanders; their comment was silence and dignity.
To them all had become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent, temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a worn-out civilisation.
So, under the circumstances, it was scarcely to be wondered that Neville hesitated to introduce the subject of Valerie West as he sat in the parlour at Spindrift House with his father and mother, reading the _Tribune_ or the _Evening Post_ or poring over some ancient tome of travels, or looking out across the cliffs at an icy sea splintering and glittering against a coast of frozen adamant.
At length he could remain no longer; commissions awaited him in town; hunger for Valerie gnawed ceaselessly, unsubdued by his letters or by hers to him.
"Mother," he said, the evening before his departure, "would it surprise you very much if I told you that I wished to marry ?" "No," she said, tranquilly; "you mean Stephanie Swift, I suppose." [Illustration: "Tall, transparently pale, negative in character."] His father glanced up over his spectacles, and he hesitated; then, as his father resumed his reading: "I don't mean Stephanie, mother." His father laid aside his book and removed, the thin gold-rimmed spectacles.
"I understand from Lily that we are to be prepared to receive Stephanie Swift as your affianced wife," he said.

"I shall be gratified.