hero.

"Colonel De Willoughby is so flattering," she said; "and he has such a
queer way of paying compliments. I'm almost frightened of him."

"I will see that he does not speak to you again," said her partner, with
an air of magnificent courage. "He should not have been allowed to come
in. You, of course, could not understand, but--the men who are here will
protect the ladies who are their guests."

Rupert gave his father a long look and turned on his heel. He went home,
and the next time the Terpsichorean Society invited him to a dance he
declined to go.

"Nice fellow I am to go to such places," he said to himself. "Liable to
bring a drunken lunatic down upon them at any minute. No, the devil take
it all, I'm going to stay at home!"

He stayed at home, and gradually dropped out of the young, glowing,
innocently frivolous and happy world altogether, and it carried on its
festivities perfectly well without him. The selfishness of lovely youth
is a guileless, joyous thing, and pathetic inasmuch as maturity realises
the undue retribution which befalls it as it learns of life.

When poverty and loneliness fell upon him, the boy had no youthful
ameliorations, even though he was so touchingly young. Occasionally some
old friend of his grandfather's encountered him somewhere and gave him
rather florid good advice; some kindly matron, perhaps, asked him to come
and see her; but there was no one in the place who could do anything
practical. Delisleville had never been a practical place, and now its day
seemed utterly over. Its gentlemanly pretence at business had received
blows too heavy to recover from until times had lapsed; in some of the
streets tiny tufts of grass began to show themselves between the stones.

As he had walked back in the heat, Rupert had observed these tiny tufts
of green with a new sense of their meaning. He was thinking of them as he
lay upon the grass, the warm scent of the mock-orange blossoms and roses,
mingled with honeysuckle in the air, the booming of the bees among the
multiflora blooms was in his ears.

"What can I do?" he said to himself. "There is nothing to be done here.
There never was much, and now there is nothing. I can't loaf about and
starve. I won't beg from people, and if I would, I haven't a relation
left who isn't a beggar himself--and there are few enough of them left."

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a well-worn greenback. He
straightened out its creases cau