s somewhere between the entrees and the fruit, and the point of
departure was Boston art.

"Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think
of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I
should think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like
that."

Winton stared--open-mouthed, it is to be feared.

"I--I beg your pardon," he stammered, with the inflection which takes
its pitch from blank bewilderment.

Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled man
of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy's phrase, she
could make him "sit up."

"I beg yours, I'm sure," she said demurely. "I didn't know it was a
craft secret."

Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was
sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery
eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.

"I'd like to know what Adams has been telling you," he said.
"Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly
original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an
original thing in all my life."

For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic
pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant.
But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it
was the lover who spoke when he went on.

"That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make
it--to have to confirm your poor opinion of me."

"Did I say anything like that?" she protested.

"Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been
thinking it all along. Don't ask me how I know it: I couldn't explain
it if I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way--you know
you have."

The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind as
she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular
experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that
he had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go
back.

"There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,"
she pleaded in extenuation.

"And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true
enough to hurt."

She looked him fairly in the eyes. "What is lacking, Mr. Winton--the
spur?"

"Possibly," he rejoined. "There is no one near enough to care, or to
say 'Well done!'"

"How can you tell?" she questioned mus