Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/108

 bachelors, and as many shower-baths. There are three pianos, so far apart that pieces thundered upon each at the same time will not collide. There are forty horses in the stable, and in the bay a yacht whose business it is to take Mr. Dunbar to his Wall-street office every morning and home every night.

One Sunday in June, the impressively rich Mr. Dunbar, in perfect clothes, sat on his high horse Lotus, and talked over the top of a box hedge to a beautiful lady in a white dress, who was up to her knees in cut roses and was working further havoc with a pair of bright scissors. The lady was tall and slender. She looked about twenty-eight. As a matter of fact, she had been for twenty years the wife of the tall, careworn man on the horse, and had borne him two sons and two daughters, one of the daughters being herself married. Dunbar's face had finance and success written upon it in deep, grim lines. His hair was thin, but not yet gray; his mustache, half white; his expression, set and tired. Only his eyes