to
pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some
shabby-genteel, hall bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by
ill-fitting "hand-me-downs"--till by wretched gradations he arrived
finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent
cigars!

There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of
marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were
a fair exchange for wealth any day. "Cutlet for cutlet"--the satiric
phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself,
it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions--there
was Katharine Fargo!

He had known her since a time when she bestrode a small fuzzy pony in
the park, cool as a grapefruit and with a critical eye, even in her ten
years, for social forms and observances. In the intervals of fashionable
boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and
correct. The Fargo fortune--thanks to modern journalism, which was fond
of stating that if the steel rails of the Fargo railways were set end
to end, the chain would reach from the earth to the planet Saturn or
thereabouts--was as familiar to the public imagination as Caruso or
the Hope diamond. And the daughter Katharine had not lacked admirers;
shop-girls knew the scalps that dangled from her girdle. But in his
heart John Valiant was aware, by those subtle signs which men and women
alike distinguish, that while Katharine Fargo loved first and foremost
only her own wonderful person, he had been an easy second in her regard.

He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos' place on
the St. Lawrence. Its habitues irreverently dubbed this "The Shack",
but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in
a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs,
was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most
indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host's
swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled
the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the
wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature--her face fore-shortened and
touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning
logs in the room behind--the perfect flower, he had thought, of the
civilization in which he lived.

John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes
shining in