ate!"

"It never is till you arrive. You are always out in the cold there."

"That sounds American."

"Every man is a sinner one way or another."

"You are very clever--cleverer than your father ever was.

"I hope so."

"Why?"

"He went--there. I've come--from there."

"And you think you will stay--never go back?"

"He was out of it for twenty years, and died. If I am in it for that
long, I shall have had enough."

Their eyes met. The woman looked at him steadily. "You won't be," she
replied, this time seriously, and in a very low voice.

"No? Why?"

"Because you will tire of it all--though you've started very well."

She then answered a question of Captain Maudsley's and turned again to
Gaston.

"What will make me tire of it?" he inquired. She sipped her champagne
musingly.

"Why, what is in you deeper than all this; with the help of some woman
probably."

She looked at him searchingly, then added:

"You seem strangely like and yet unlike your father to-night."

"I am wearing his clothes," he said.

She had plenty of nerve, but this startled her. She shrank a little: it
seemed uncanny. Now she remembered that ribbon in the button-hole.

"Poor Sophie!" she thought. "And this one will make greater mischief
here." Then, aloud to him: "Your father was a good fellow, but he did
wild things."

"I do not see the connection," he answered. "I am not a good man, and I
shall do wilder things--is that it?"

"You will do mad things," she replied hardly above a whisper, and talked
once more with Captain Maudsley. Gaston now turned to his grandfather,
who had heard a sentence here and there, and felt that the young man
carried off the situation well enough. He then began to talk in a
general way about Gaston's voyage, of the Hudson's Bay Company, and
expeditions to the Arctic, drawing Lady Dargan into the conversation.

Whatever might be said of Sir William Belward he was an excellent host.
He had a cool, unmalicious wit, but that man was unwise who offered
himself to its severity. To-night he surpassed himself in suggestive
talk, until, all at once, seeing Lady Dargan's eyes fixed on Gaston,
he went silent, sitting back in his chair abstracted. Soon, however, a
warning glance from his wife brought him back and saved Lady Dargan from
collapse; for it seemed impossible to talk alone to this ghost of her
past.

At this moment Gaston heard a voice near:

"As like as if he'd stepped out of the picture, i