e girls. My name is Uriah
Grey."

"Mine is David Larkin," said David, and he smiled cheerfully, "and I've
promised not to make love."

"What--never?" exclaimed Mr. Grey.

"Not until I have a right to," said David.

Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the
arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject
of remark.

"I love stories," he said, "and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar
and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare
rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find
your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young
Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East."

"Whom he does not know from Adam," said David.

"Whom he does not distinguish from Adam," corrected Mr. Grey. "But I was
thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that
just now you made a most enticing beginning as--'I, Roger Slyweather of
Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or
thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to
make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April....'"

"Oh," said David, "if it's my story you want, I don't mind a bit. It
will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are
bored."

And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his story, withholding
only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand
dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.

"Well," said Mr. Grey, when David had finished, "I don't know your
holding-out powers, Larkin, but you do certainly speak the truth without
mincing."

"That," said David, "is a promise I have made to myself in admiration of
and emulation of my friend. But I have had my little lesson, and I shall
keep the other promises until I have made good."

"And then?" Mr. Grey beamed.

"Then," said David, "I shall smoke and I shall make love."

"But no liquor."

David laughed.

"I have a secret clause in my pledge," said he; "it is not to touch
liquor except on the personal invitation of my future father-in-law,
whoever he may be." But he had Dolly Tennant's father in his mind, and
the joke seemed good to him.

"Well," said Mr. Grey, "I don't know as I'd go into apple-growing. You
haven't got enough capital."

"But," said David, "I intend to begin at the bottom and work up."

"When I was a youngster,