in the most modern and approved way. He won't be content with what he himself knows about the requirements—though that's a lot;—he'll get the advice of experts. I hear that he and Floyd are going on to New York next week to consult the superintendents and staff officers of hospitals there; that's the right way to deal with such a thing as this. Uncle George and the other executors made a wise move when they put Edwards on the committee."
"In short, he's intensely practical," said Stewart, with disgust.
What with her father's chagrin and her husband's sense of grievance, Lydia was made sufficiently aware of the altered feeling in the family toward Floyd. Of the two men her father was the more outspoken. He declared that nothing but a sense of duty to a trust detained him at a task in the execution of which he was often overruled and humiliated. He had been slighted by Floyd; Barstow had supported Floyd—"for with Barstow it's off with the old master, on with the new," said Mr. Dunbar cynically. "Floyd thinks he can at once fill Colonel Halket's shoes," he added. "But Colonel Halket was a good deal bigger man than his grandson will ever grow to be." Mr. Dunbar was in fact smarting under disappointment. His modest, worthy ambition to wear the mantle of the first citizen of Avalon, which had so long adorned Colonel Halket's shoulders, seemed now unlikely of fulfillment—and Floyd was the obstacle. Floyd was depriving him of the importance and eminence which as the senior executor of Colonel Halket's estate he should have enjoyed. If he had been permitted, as in the ordinary decencies of life he should have been, to display himself as the principal figure in disposing of Colonel Halket's benefactions, it would have harmed no one and it would have been to his own innocent aggrandizement. But egotism or jealousy or some such petty motive had denied him this—denied him a place on the committee of judges; Floyd had in-
