suffice to accomplish your scientific object, and
even if it were larger, you are quite right to decline with thanks'.
Kittie must be patient, and you must be firm, for you are both quite
young enough to afford to wait a few years. Loving little heart! She
longed to aid you, and this was the only method that presented itself.
If we can secure the commission I mentioned last week, your marriage
need only be deferred until Kittie is twenty-one. After all, Prince,
when you bartered your name and became a Darrington, for sake of this
fair heritage, you only accomplished early in life that into which
sooner or later all men are betrayed, the sale of a birthright for a
mess of pottage; the clutching at the shadowy present, thereby losing
the substantial future."

"On that score I indulge no regrets. General Darrington was the only
father I ever knew, and since it was his wish, I shall gladly wear the
name with which he endowed me, in grateful recognition of the
affection, confidence and generous kindness he lavished upon me. That
the rich legacy he designed for me has been diverted into the channel
of all others most repugnant to him, is my misfortune, not his fault;
for ho took every possible precaution to secure my inheritance. Had I
been indeed his own son, he could not have done more, and I have a
son's right to mourn sincerely over his cruel and untimely end."

The two men sat on the front steps at "Elm Bluff", and as Prince's eyes
wandered over the exceeding beauty of the "great greenery" of velvet
lawn, the stately, venerable growth of forest trees, wearing the
adolescent mask of tender young foliage, the outlying fields flanking
the park, the sunny acres now awave with crinkling mantles of grain, he
sighed very heavily at the realization of all that adverse fortune had
snatched away.

Blond as Baldur of the Voluspa, with a wealth of golden brown beard
veiling his lips and chin, he appeared far more than six years the
junior of the clear cut, smoothly shaven face that belonged to his
prospective brother-in-law; and their countenances contrasted as
vividly as the portraiture of bland phlegmatic Norse Aesir, with some
bronze image of Mercury, as keenly alert as his sacred symbolic cocks.

Strolling leisurely through the flowery decoying fields, that beckon
all around the outskirts of the vast, lonely wilderness of positive
Science, the dewy freshness of the youthful amateur still clung to
Prince's garments; even a