n I am, and the housekeeper can give you points
on being a real, head-on-a-pole-over-the-shoulder lady." A low fellow at
heart was Charley Whitney, like so many of his similarly placed
compatriots, though he strove as hard as do they, almost as hard as his
wife, to conceal the deficiencies due to early training in vulgarly
democratic ways of living and thinking.

Arthur, ushered by the excruciatingly fashionable butler into the
smallest of the series of reception _salons_, fell straightway into the
most melancholy spirits. He felt the black, icy shadow of the beginnings
of doubt as to his right to admittance on terms of equality, now that his
titles to nobility had been torn from him and destroyed. He felt that he
was in grave danger of being soon mingled in the minds of his fashionable
friends and their servants with the vulgar herd, the respectable but
"impossible" middle classes. Indeed, he was not sure that he didn't
really belong among them. The sound of Janet's subdued, most elegant
rustle, drove out of his mind everything but an awful dread of what she
would say and think and feel when he had disclosed to her the hideous
truth. She came sweeping in, her eyes full of unshed tears, her manner a
model of refined grief, sympathetic, soothing. She was tall and slim, a
perfect figure of the long, lithe type; her face was small and fine and
dreamy; her hair of an unusual straw color, golden, yet pale, too, like
the latest autumn leaves in the wan sun of November; her eyes were hazel,
in strange and thrilling contrast to her hair. To behold her was to
behold all that man finds most fascinating in woman, but so illumined by
the soul within that to look on it with man's eye for charms feminine
seemed somewhat like casting sensuous glances upon beauty enmarbled in a
temple's fane. Janet was human, but the human that points the way to
sexless heaven.

"_Dear_ Artie!" she said gently. "_Dear_ Artie!" And she took both his
hands and, as she looked at him, her tears fell. Arthur, in his new
humility of poverty, felt honored indeed that any loss of his could
cause her matchless soul thus to droop upon its dazzling outer walls
the somber, showery insignia of grief. "But," she went on, "you have
him still with you--his splendid, rugged character, the memory of all
he did for you."

Arthur was silent. They were seated now, side by side, and he was,
somewhat timidly, holding one of her hands.

"He was so simple and so honest--su