sgust to
think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
blent with such base elements.

His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.

"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
to-morrow. Please don't come till then--I want to think the question
over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won't you help me to be
reasonable?"

It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't stand
in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he must drop back into
his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
resignation closed in on him like a fog.

"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.

He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.

Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
Flamel's presence than a surplice in the street.

"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll see one bore
instead of twenty."

The apartme