bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by ill-fitting “hand-me-downs”—till by wretched gradations he arrived finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent cigars!

There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were a fair exchange for wealth any day. “Cutlet for cutlet”—the satiric phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself, it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions—there was Katharine Fargo!

He had known her since a time when she bestrode a small fuzzy pony in the park, cool as a grapefruit and with a critical eye, even in her ten years, for social forms and observances. In the intervals of fashionable boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and correct. The Fargo fortune—thanks to modern journalism, which was fond of stating that if the steel rails of the Fargo railways were set end to end, the chain would reach from the earth to the planet Saturn or thereabouts—was as familiar to the public imagination as Caruso or the Hope diamond. And the daughter Katharine had not lacked admirers; shop-girls knew the scalps that dangled from her girdle. But in his heart John Valiant was aware, by those subtle signs which men and women alike distinguish, that while Katharine Fargo loved first and foremost only her own wonderful person, he had been an easy second in her regard.

He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos’ place on the St. Lawrence. Its habitués irreverently dubbed this “The Shack”, but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs, was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host’s swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature—her face fore-shortened and touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning logs in the room behind—the perfect flower, he had thought, of the civilization in which he lived.

John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes shining in the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. “Not on your life, Chum!” he said. “No shameless barter! There must be other things besides money and social position in this doddering old world, after all!”

The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the strong tense hand held down to him. “Do you know, old chap,” his master continued, “I’ve been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths in the last few weeks? I’ve been the prize dolt of the whole show, and you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You’ve probably realized it all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I’ve worn the blue ribbon so long I’d come to think it was a decoration. All my life I’ve been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who have never done a blessed thing that’s the slightest value to anybody else. Well, Chum, we’re through. We’re going to begin doing something for ourselves, if it’s only raising cabbages! And we’re going to stand it without any baby-aching—the nurse never held our noses when we took our castor-oil!”

It was folded down, that old bright page. Finis had been written to the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity that had wrenched him even for a moment.

He turned from the window, picked up his letters, and followed by the dog, went slowly up another flight to his room.

CHAPTER V

THE LETTER

He tore open the letters abstractedly: the usual dinner-card or two, a tailor’s spring announcement, a chronic serial from an exclamatory marble-quarrying company, a quarterly statement of a club house-committee. The last two missives bore a nondescript look.

One was small, with the name of a legal firm in its corner. The other was largish, corpulent and heavy, of stout Manila paper, and bore, down one side, a gaudy procession of postage stamps proclaiming that it had been registered.

“What’s in that, I wonder?” he said to himself, and then, with a smile at the unmasculine speculation, opened the smaller envelope.

“Dear Sir,” began the letter, in the most uncompromisingly conventional of typewriting: