was too much in the nature of a confidence to be
repeated, but it had left Huntington with a definite impression that
Thatcher must be feeling the conditions acutely or he would not have
begun to curtail expenses at home. To a man who lived as Thatcher did,
Huntington knew that this would be the hardest duty he would find to
perform. Cosden's question was answered lightly.

"Wall Street is being hit hard," he said. "I am hoping that so good a
fellow as Thatcher won't be caught in the reaction."

"Don't worry about that," Cosden laughed. "You'll find when the sky
clears that he has looked far enough ahead to make even the storm pay
him tribute."

"Hamlen arrives to-morrow," Huntington remarked, changing the subject
lest his question raise some doubts in Cosden's mind which might linger.
"I shall give myself up to him a good deal while he is here, so you
mustn't be surprised if you don't see as much of me as usual. He needs
me more than you do."

"That may be," Cosden admitted, "but how about you? I have an idea that,
with the peculiar state of mind you've been in lately, you will forget
your overpowering sense of age better with me than you will with him."

"Perhaps," Huntington admitted, smiling; "but I must think of him
first."

"You don't mind my butting in on you both once in a while?"

"On the contrary; but I know how little you have in common with Hamlen.
I'm afraid he may bore you."

"You forget my reincarnation," Cosden said dryly. "Who knows but that I
was a professor of classical antiquities in my previous existence? If he
bores me I'll cut out; but I've an idea that he can teach me a thing or
two, and just now I'm keen on becoming educated."

There was a marked restraint in Hamlen's manner when Huntington met him
at the station and motored him to the Beacon Street house. His
embarrassment and the all too obvious efforts he made to impress upon
his friend the occasion of his leaving Bermuda would have convinced
Huntington, if he had not already known, that the real reason was that
which he had already anticipated in his prediction to Mrs. Thatcher. Yet
no one but Hamlen knew the agony of loneliness he had experienced when,
after watching the steamer disappear, he returned to his empty villa. No
one but Hamlen knew of the struggle he had passed through in his efforts
to readjust his life, or of the terror which came to him with the final
realization that he could no longer find solace in the work which