bout
her lips that appeals to you. That isn't love, Olaf, as we women
understand it. Ah, no, a girl's love for a man doesn't depend altogether
upon his fitness to be used as an advertisement for somebody's
ready-made clothing."

"You fancy you know what you are talking about," said Rudolph Musgrave,
"but you don't. You don't realize, you see, how beautiful she--was."

And this time, he nearly tripped upon the tense, for her hand was on his
arm, and, in consequence, a series of warm, delicious little shivers was
running about his body in a fashion highly favorable to extreme
perturbation of mind.

"You should have told her, Olaf," she said, wistfully. "Oh, Olaf, Olaf,
why didn't you tell her?"

She did not know, of course, how she was tempting him; she did not know,
of course, how her least touch seemed to waken every pulse in his body
to an aching throb, and set hope and fear a-drumming in his breast.
Obviously, she did not know; and it angered him that she did not.

"She would have laughed at me," he said, with a snarl; "how she would
have laughed!"

"She wouldn't have laughed, Olaf." And, indeed, she did not look as if
she would.

"But much you know of her!" said Rudolph Musgrave, morosely. "She was
just like the rest of them, I tell you! She knew how to stare a man out
of countenance with big purple eyes that were like violets with the dew
on them, and keep her paltry pink-and-white baby face all pensive and
sober, till the poor devil went stark, staring mad, and would have
pawned his very soul to tell her that he loved her! She knew! She did it
on purpose. She would look pensive just to make an ass of you! She--"

And here the colonel set his teeth for a moment, and resolutely drew
back from the abyss.

"She would not have cared for me," he said, with a shrug. "I was not
exactly the sort of fool she cared for. What she really cared for was a
young fool who could dance with her in this silly new-fangled gliding
style, and send her flowers and sweet-meats, and make love to her
glibly--and a petticoated fool who would envy her fine feathers,--and,
at last, a knavish fool who would barter his title for her money. She
preferred fools, you see, but she would never have cared for a
middle-aged penniless fool like me. And so," he ended, with a vicious
outburst of mendacity, "I never told her, and she married a title and
lived unhappily in gilded splendor ever afterwards."

"You should have told her, Olaf," Miss