n effort that he had
planned for her that July day when they had become engaged.

"For the present."

"How can you love me? Your life would have been so different. You have
always said that you were equipped with ideal conditions, just enough
money to work as you liked. And now you can't escape unless I die."

He disliked to utter commonplace lies; although she spoke the truth in
her sudden realization of the facts to have him deny it, he could not
protest; so he kissed her instead and said, later:

"We can't reckon things that way." Her old look of misery came back.

"You can't win with me."

"But I have won love."

And she was appeased.

From that date he had become a man in the sordid sense of the word. He
had taken his father-in-law sternly in hand, presented the case
firmly, and showed him the extent of the sacrifice his worthless life
had made necessary. He paid from that day the normal income to the
Misses Ellwell's bankers, but he gave the stock-broker to understand
that was the end. Any further protection for him was not to be found
in this life.

A few months later he hung out his shingle as practising physician and
surgeon. There would be need enough of money in his life; the way to
get it was by using his acquaintances in Boston and practising only
about a few streets of the Back Bay. So at thirty he had begun the
ordinary routine of a well-connected physician--the profession he had
sneered at in his youth, the profession of polite humbug.

IX

The next fifteen years that carried Jarvis Thornton over from one
generation to another passed with placid monotony. He had been
decidedly successful. His little round of Boston streets where he
doled out mental and physical encouragement, resounded with his
praises. Moreover he was known as a "good fellow," an epithet that his
warmest friends in Camberton days would not have bestowed on him. He
was sleek and solid; well-groomed and rounded, in spite of constant
activity, and if his scientific reputation was not more than mediocre,
it was enough to give him a lectureship on neurosis in the Camberton
Medical School--that necessary mark of approval for a doctor
practising in his circle. He spent eight months of each year in
Boston; the other four he practised at Wolf Head, a fashionable
sea-side place that he had done much to promote. There he had built a
roomy cottage on a little point of land, and he had shrewdly invested
in the Improvement Comp