on.

You will retrace the year to the 10th of June. Richard, after roving the
Eastern earth for a decade, had just returned to his own land, which he
hardly knew. Throughout those ten years of long idling from one European
city to another, had Richard met the woman he might love, he would have
laid siege to her, conquered her, and brought her home as his wife. But
his instinct was too tribal, too American. Whether it were Naples or
Paris or Vienna or St. Petersburg or Berlin, those women whom he met
might have pleased him in everything save wedlock. In London, and for a
moment, Richard saw a girl he looked at twice. But she straightway drank
beer with the gusto of a barge-man, and the vision passed.

It was the evening after his return, and Richard at the Waldorf sat
amusing himself with those tides of vulgar humanity that ebb and flow in
a stretch of garish corridor known as Peacock Lane. Surely it was a
hopeless place wherein to seek a wife, and Richard had no such thought.
But who shall tell how and when and where his fate will overtake him?
Who is to know when Satan--or a more benevolent spirit--will be hiding
behind the hedge to play good folk a marriage trick? And Richard had
been warned. Once, in Calcutta, price one rupee, a necromancer after
fullest reading of the signs informed him that when he met the woman who
should make a wife to him, she would come upon him suddenly. Wherefore,
he should have kept a brighter watch, expecting the unexpected.

Richard's gaze went following two rustical people--clearly bride and
groom. In a cloudy way he loathed the groom, and was foggily wondering
why. His second thought would have told him that the male of his
species--such is his sublime egotism--feels cheated with every wedding
not his own, and, for an earliest impulse on beholding a woman with
another man, would tear her from that other one by force. Thus did his
skinclad ancestors when time was.

However, Richard had but scanty space wherein either to enjoy his blunt
hatred of that bridegroom or theorize as to its roots. His ear caught a
muffled scream, and then down the wide staircase in front of him a
winsome girl came tumbling.

With a dexterity born of a youth more or less replete of football,
Richard sprang forward and caught the girl in his arms. He caught and
held her as though she were feather-light; and that feat of a brutal
strength, even through her fright, worked upon the saved one, who,
remembering her