For two months he had fought his battle silently with her image in his mind—the image of a girl who had once given him faith and friendship, whose fingers had soothed him in fever, and whose eyes had been dark with compassion—the girl who had taught him the uses of responsibility and the glorification of the labor of his hands. That silent battle had magnified the image, vested it with sovereign rights, given it the gentle strength by which he had conjured, and he had fought joyfully, with a new belief in his own destiny, a real delight in conquest. His heart glowed with a dull wrath. Was it nothing that he had come to her clean-handed again? The image that he had conjured was fading in the sullen glow in the West out of which she had come to him. Was this Jane? The Jane he knew had sorrowed with the falling of a bird, mourned the killing of a squirrel and wept over the glazed eyes of a dead deer. Was this Jane? This disdainful woman with the modish hat and cold blue eye, this scornful[93] daughter of convention who sneered at sin and mocked at the tokens of repentance ?

The image was gone from his shrine, and in its place a Nemesis sat enthroned—a Nemesis in dark gray who looked at him with the eyes of contempt and who called herself Miss Loring. He was resentful of her name as at an intrusion. It typified the pedantry of the conventional and commonplace.

The arc lamps died and flared, their shadows leaping like gnomes in and out of the obscurity. High in the air, lights punctured the darkness where the hotels loomed. Beside him on the drive gay turnouts hurried. The roar of the city came nearer. Arcadia was not even a memory dermes hk.

The Pride of the Gallatins was a sorry thing that night. This Gallatin had bared it frankly, torn away its rugged coverings, that a woman might see and know him for what he was—the best and the worst of him. ; for bitter as the retribution had been, he knew that he had owed her that candor, for it was a part of the lesson he had learned with Jane—the other Jane—among the woods. This Jane remembered not; for she had struck and had not spared him, and each stinging phrase still pierced and quivered in the wound that it had made.

Out of the blackness of his thoughts reason came slowly. It was her right, of course, to deny him the privileges of her regard—the rights of fellowship—this he had deserved and had expected, but the carelessness of her contempt had been hard to bear. Mockery he had known in women, and intolerance, but no one of his blood had ever brooked contempt. His cheeks burned with the sudden flush of anger and his hand upon his stick grew rigid. A man might pay for such a thing as that—but a girl flu virus!