tty, of a fine sensibility and intellectual without
loss of femininity, the girl would have been fitly mated with a man of
the finest clay. How could she have married Paul? Bachelder thought, and
correctly, that he discerned the reason in a certain warmth of romantic
feeling that tinged her speech and manner. Daughter of an Episcopal
clergyman in Paul's native town, she had sighed for something different
from the humdrum of small teas, dinners, parochial calls, and when Paul
came to her with the glamour of tropical travel upon him, she married,
mistaking the glamour for him.

"She loved me for the dangers I had passed!" the artist mused, quoting
Shakespeare, on his way home. "What a tragedy when she discovers him for
a spurious Othello!"

Dropping into the studio next morning, Paul answered the other question.
"Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is
here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral
plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention
beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that
we committed----"

"That _you_ committed," Bachelder sharply corrected. "And what of the
child?"

Blinking in the old fashion, Paul went on, "I was coming to that. She
cannot be allowed to grow up a little Mexican. I shall adopt her and
have her properly educated." Here he looked at Bachelder as though
expecting commendation for his honorable intention, and, receiving none,
went on, dilating on his plans for the child as if resolved to earn it.
Yet, setting aside this patent motive, it was easy to see as he warmed
to his subject that Andrea had not erred in counting on Lola to bring
him back. With her beauty she would do any man proud! The whole United
States would not be able to produce her rival! She should have the best
that money could give her!

Wondering at the curious mixture of class egotism, paternal tenderness
and twisted morality, Bachelder listened to the end, then said, "Of
course, Mrs. Steiner approves of a ready-made family?"

Paul's proud feathers draggled a little, and he reddened. "Well--you
see--she thinks Lola is the daughter of a dead mining friend. Some day,
of course, I'll tell her. In fact, the knowledge will grow on her. But
not now. It wouldn't do. She couldn't understand."

"No?" But the quiet sarcasm was wasted on Paul, and the artist
continued, "Aren't you leaving Andrea out of your calculations?"