Strong faith alone could have withstood the continued contact with such a determined fatalism as Aunt Mary’s, and yet it is interesting to note that Honora’s belief in her providence never wavered.  A prince was to come who was to bear her away from the ragmen and the boarding-houses and the soot:  and incidentally and in spite of herself, Aunt Mary was to come too, and Uncle Tom.  And sometimes when she sat reading of an evening under the maple, her book would fall to her lap and the advent of this personage become so real a thing that she bounded when the gate slammed —­to find that it was only Peter.

It was preposterous, of course, that Peter should be a prince in disguise.  Peter who, despite her efforts to teach him distinction in dress, insisted upon wearing the same kind of clothes.  A mild kind of providence, Peter, whose modest functions were not unlike those of the third horse which used to be hitched on to the street car at the foot of the Seventeenth-Street hill:  it was Peter’s task to help pull Honora through the interminable summers.  Uhrig’s Cave was an old story now:  mysteries were no longer to be expected in St. Louis.  There was a great panorama—­or something to that effect—­in the wilderness at the end of one of the new electric lines, where they sometimes went to behold the White Squadron of the new United States Navy engaged in battle with mimic forts on a mimic sea, on the very site where the country place of Madame Clement had been.  The mimic sea, surrounded by wooden stands filled with common people eating peanuts and popcorn, was none other than Madame Clement’s pond, which Honora remembered as a spot of enchantment.  And they went out in the open cars with these same people, who stared at Honora as though she had got in by mistake, but always politely gave her a seat.  And Peter thanked them.  Sometimes he fell into conversations with them, and it was noticeable that they nearly always shook hands with him at parting.  Honora did not approve of this familiarity.

“But they may be clients some day,” he argued—­a frivolous answer to which she never deigned to reply.

Just as one used to take for granted that third horse which pulled the car uphill, so Peter was taken for granted.  He might have been on the highroad to a renown like that of Chief Justice Marshall, and Honora had been none the wiser.

“Well, Peter,” said Uncle Tom at dinner one evening of that memorable summer, when Aunt Mary was helping the blackberries, and incidentally deploring that she did not live in the country, because of the cream one got there, “I saw Judge Brice in the bank to-day, and he tells me you covered yourself with glory in that iron foundry suit.”

“The Judge must have his little joke, Mr. Leffingwell,” replied Peter, but he reddened nevertheless.

Honora thought winning an iron foundry suit a strange way to cover one’s self with glory.  It was not, at any rate, her idea of glory.  What were lawyers for, if not to win suits?  And Peter was a lawyer.