arrogant nature which the girl had sometimes given him, and
which Matt could not have received in the times of trouble and sorrow
when he had chiefly seen her. Matt's confession was a shock; Wade was
scarcely less dismayed by the complications which it suggested; but he
could no more impart his misgivings than his impressions; he could no
more tell Matt that his father would be embarrassed and compromised by
his passion than he could tell him that he did not think Sue Northwick
was worthy of it. He was in the helpless predicament that confidants
often find themselves in, but his final perception of his
impossibilities enabled him to return the fervid pressure of Matt's
hand, and even to utter some of those incoherencies which serve the
purpose when another wishes to do the talking.

"Of course," said Matt, "I'm ridiculous, I know that. I haven't got
anything to found my hopes on but the fact that there's nothing in my
way to the one insuperable obstacle: to the fact that she doesn't and
can't really care a straw for me. But just now that seems a mere
bagatelle." He laughed with a nervous joy, and he kept talking, as he
walked up and down Wade's study. "I don't know that I have the hope of
anything; and I don't see how I'm to find out whether I have or not, for
the present. You know, Wade," he went on, with a simple-hearted
sweetness, which Wade found touching, "I'm twenty-eight years old, and I
don't believe I've ever been in love before. Little fancies, of course;
summer flirtations; every one has them; but never anything serious,
anything like _this_. And I could see, at home, that they would be glad
to have had me married. I rather think my father believes that a good
sensible wife would bring me back to faith in commercial civilization."
He laughed out his relish of the notion, but went on, gravely: "Poor
father! This whole business has been a terrible trial to him."

Wade wondered at his ability to separate the thought of Suzette from the
thought of her father; he inferred from his ability to do so that he
must have been thinking of her a great deal, but he asked, "Isn't it all
rather sudden, Matt?" Wade put on a sympathetic, yet diplomatic, smile
for the purpose of this question.

"Not for me!" said Matt. He added, not very consequently, "I suppose it
must have happened to me the first moment I saw her here that day Louise
and I came up about the accident. I couldn't truly say that she had ever
been out of my mi