were none to gibe and
sneer. The contrast of the traveling show would be as great for him as
it had been for Margaret, but he was the male of the species, and she
the female. Chivalry, racial, harking back to the beginning of nobility
in the human, to its earliest dawn, fired Sydney. The pale daylight
invaded the study. Sydney, as truly as any knight of old, had girded
himself, and with no hope, no thought of reward, for the battle in the
eternal service of the strong for the weak, which makes the true worth
of the strong.

There was only one way. Sydney Lord took it. His sister was spared the
knowledge of the truth for a long while. When she knew, she did not
lament; since Sydney had taken the course, it must be right. As for
Margaret, not knowing the truth, she yielded. She was really on the
verge of illness. Her spirit was of too fine a strain to enable her body
to endure long. When she was told that she was to remain with Sydney's
sister while Sydney went away on business, she made no objection. A
wonderful sense of relief, as of wings of healing being spread under her
despair, was upon her. Camille came to bid her good-by.

"I hope you have a nice visit in this lovely house," said Camille, and
kissed her. Camille was astute, and to be trusted. She did not betray
Sydney's confidence. Sydney used a disguise--a dark wig over his
partially bald head and a little make-up-and he traveled about with the
show and sat on three chairs, and shook hands with the gaping crowd,
and was curiously happy. It was discomfort; it was ignominy; it was
maddening to support by the exhibition of his physical deformity a
perfectly worthless young couple like Jack and Camille Desmond, but it
was all superbly ennobling for the man himself.

Always as he sat on his three chairs, immense, grotesque--the more
grotesque for his splendid dignity of bearing--there was in his soul
of a gallant gentleman the consciousness of that other, whom he was
shielding from a similar ordeal. Compassion and generosity, so great
that they comprehended love itself and excelled its highest type,
irradiated the whole being of the fat man exposed to the gaze of his
inferiors. Chivalry, which rendered him almost god-like, strengthened
him for his task. Sydney thought always of Margaret as distinct from her
physical self, a sort of crystalline, angelic soul, with no encumbrance
of earth. He achieved a purely spiritual conception of her. And
Margaret, living again