-looking
young man went too. He said he couldn't possibly marry a girl with
nothing but the clothes on her back. I cried very much at the time, and
thought my heart was broken. But--it wasn't!"

"I should hope it wouldn't break for such a selfish rascal!" said Reay,
warmly.

"Do you think he was more selfish than most?" queried Mary,
thoughtfully--"There's a good many who would do as he did."

A silence followed. She sat down and resumed her work.

"Have you finished your story?" she asked Reay--"It has interested me so
much that I'm hoping there's some more to tell."

As she spoke to him he started as if from a dream. He had been watching
her so earnestly that he had almost forgotten what he had previously
been talking about. He found himself studying the beautiful outline of
her figure, and wondering why he had never before seen such gracious
curves of neck and shoulder, waist and bosom as gave symmetrical
perfection of shape to this simple woman born of the "common" people.

"More to tell?" he echoed, hastily,--"Well, there's a little--but not
much. My love affair at Loch Lomond did one thing for me,--it made me
work hard. I had a sort of desperate idea that I might wrest a fortune
out of journalism by dint of sheer grinding at it--but I soon found out
my mistake there. I toiled away so steadily and got such a firm hold of
all the affairs of the newspaper office where I was employed, that one
fine morning I was dismissed. My proprietor, genial and kindly as ever,
said he found 'no fault'--but that he wanted 'a change.' I quite
understood that. The fact is I knew too much--that's all. I had saved a
bit, and so, with a few good letters of introduction, went on from
Glasgow to London. There, in that great black ant-hill full of crawling
sooty human life, I knocked about for a time from one newspaper office
to another, doing any sort of work that turned up, just to keep body and
soul together,--and at last I got a fairly good berth in the London
branch of a big press syndicate. It was composed of three or four
proprietors, ever so many editors, and an army of shareholders
representing almost every class in Great Britain. Ah, those
shareholders! There's the whole mischief of the press nowadays!"

"I suppose it's money again!" said Helmsley.

"Of course it is. Here's how the matter stands. A newspaper syndicate is
like any other trading company, composed for the sole end and object of
making as much profit out of