ions of your gift that she is not to
thank you or speak of it," said I. "I fear your face would betray us, if
she ever did."

"An excellent idea!" he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in
farewell: "You will win her yet--if you care to."

As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor.
Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and
women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her
dress--a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume.
Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming
to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression--did I
see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew
I was looking?

I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company
and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of
self-pity. I quite forgot, for that moment, _her_ side of the story.

XXVIII. BLACKLOCK SEES A LIGHT

It was next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in
the entrance of the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his
summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several
times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty
work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently
used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds
they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the
profits and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk.
It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom,
or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to
my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating
brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I
put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman _really_ cares for,"
I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind
of man she _imagines_ she cares for."

Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces
in the friendliest way--I was harboring no resentment against him, and I
wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the
buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see
you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate