As youth became mature and wise, in the sad heartrending fashion youth has, or flitted to new hearths, in that other heartbreaking way of youth, it was noted that leases were not to be renewed on any terms; and the new tenants, in turn, were ever such light and unthrift folk as the old, always with tall sons and gay daughters--as if the mythical agent or his ghostly principal had set apart that old house to mirth and joy and laughter, to youth and love.

It was remembered then, on certain struggling hill farms, that old McClintock had been childless; and certain hill babies were cuddled the closer for that.
Then, thirty years later, or forty--some such matter--McClintock slipped back to Vesper unheralded--very many times a millionaire; incidentally a hopeless invalid, sentenced for life to a wheeled chair; Vesper's most successful citizen.
Silent, uncomplaining, unapproachable, and grim, he kept to his rooms in the Iroquois, oldest of Vesper's highly modern hotels; or was wheeled abroad by his one attendant, who was valet, confidant, factotum, and friend--Cornelius Van Lear, withered, parchment-faced, and brown, strikingly like Rameses II as to appearance and garrulity.

It was to Van Lear that Vesper owed the known history of those forty years of McClintock's.

Closely questioned, the trusted confidant had once yielded to cajolery.
"We've been away," said Van Lear.
It was remarked that the inexplicable Mitchell House policy remained in force in the years since McClintock's return; witness the present incumbent, frivolous Thompson, foreigner from Buffalo--him and his house parties! It was Mitchell House still, mauger the McClintock millions and a half-century of possession.

Whether this clinging to the old name was tribute to the free-handed Mitchells or evidence of fine old English firmness is a matter not yet determined.
The free-handed Mitchells themselves, as a family, were no more.