y mocked him and pretended to
confide in him; the confidences touching such sentimental passages as
the devotion of the Toms, the Dicks, and the Harrys of her college
years.

Since he had sometimes wished to be sentimental on his own account,
Ballard had been a little impatient under these frivolous appeals for
sympathy. But there is a certain tonic for growing love even in such
bucketings of cold water as the loved one may administer in telling the
tale of the predecessor. It is a cold heart, masculine, that will not
find warmth in anything short of the ice of indifference; and whatever
her faults, Miss Elsa was never indifferent. Ballard recalled how he had
groaned under the jesting confidences. Also, he remembered that he had
never dared to repel them, choosing rather to clasp the thorns than to
relinquish the rose.

From the sentimental journey past to the present stage of the same was
but a step; but the present situation was rather perplexingly befogged.
Why had Elsa Craigmiles changed her mind so suddenly about spending the
summer in Europe? What could have induced her to substitute a summer in
Colorado, travelling under Mrs. Van Bryck's wing?

The answer to the queryings summed itself up, for the Kentuckian, in a
name--the name of a man and a playwright. He held Mr. Lester Wingfield
responsible for the changed plans, and was irritably resentful. In the
after-dinner visit with the sight-seeing party in the Pullman there had
been straws to indicate the compass-point of the wind. Elsa deferred to
Wingfield, as the other women did; only in her case Ballard was sure it
meant more. And the playwright, between his posings as a literary
oracle, assumed a quiet air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles that
was maddening.

Ballard recalled this, sitting upon the edge of the ditch-cutting in the
heart of the fragrant night, and figuratively punched Mr. Wingfield's
head. Fate had been unkind to him, throwing him thus under the wheels of
the opportune when the missing of a single train by either the
sight-seers or himself would have spared him.

Taking that view of the matter, there was grim comfort in the thought
that the mangling could not be greatly prolonged. The two orbits
coinciding for the moment would shortly go apart again; doubtless upon
the morning's arrival in Denver. It was well. Heretofore he had been
asked to sympathise only in a subjective sense. With another lover
corporeally present and answering to h