believe."

"_Che sara sara_, but I have my doubts," she replied. Duncan's glance
was contradictory, but he did not reply. After a moment of silence he
rose to leave. "Is the truce to be granted?" he said. "Do we dance
together?"

"Yes, if you wish it so," replied Marion.

"Then to-morrow we meet at the ball. Remember hostilities have ceased.
Good-night." Marion extended her hand and Duncan held it for a moment.
"Don't let the hate grow too strong," he said pleadingly.

"It couldn't," she replied; then she quickly withdrew her hand and
turned away.

When Duncan reached the street he stopped to light a cigar. As he threw
the match away and returned his match-safe to his pocket, he carelessly
soliloquized: "When a moth sees a fire, it flutters around it to see
what it is like, and it hasn't sense enough to keep from getting burned.
A woman is much the same: excite her curiosity by the flame called love,
and it is ten to one she gets singed before she finds out what it is. I
have been talking a lot of trash, but it's all in the trade. Talk sense
to a woman and treat her decently, and she thinks you are a muff; talk
enigmatical bosh, and knock her about, and she loves you. They are all
alike. No, by Jove! they are not; Helen Osgood outclasses them all, and
she has 'hands for any sort'. Oh, well, as the Frenchman says: 'if you
haven't got what you love, love what you have.' The Sanderson is a good
looker, and you must have sport, Duncan, old man." Then shoving his
stick under his arm, and plunging his hands into his coat pockets, he
started off at a swinging pace in search of a cab.

Marion had remained seated where she and Duncan had been together. She
had listened to hear the door close behind him, and then, her face
resting in both hands, she sat thinking. Her imagination rapidly created
a visionary structure of dazzling possibilities, but the dismal silence
which follows in the steps of revelry came, and with it unrest. Quickly
her Spanish castle crumbled and faded to a lonely ruin. "It is always
so," she thought; "it is always so. Like children at a pantomime, who
picture to their minds brilliant jewels in the fairy queen's tiara, and
learn in after life that they were tawdry counterfeits, we imagine ideal
gems of possibility only to find the reality of life papier mache and
paint. Is love also a tinsel that tarnishes at the touch? So far mine
has been so. But might it not be different? Yes, but the thought is
wic