th called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"

Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can't. I'm in for a beastly
banquet."

Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her,
it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.

II

He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
there, but because one must pay for the experiment.

In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features
cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or
their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
grace of girlhood. This very competen