ren and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their
plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or
circumstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the
intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The
girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's
heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling,
whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a
silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated
from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she
had returned his first kiss.

CHAPTER XIX

General Basil Prince sat in his law office one murky December morning of
the year 1903. It was an office which bespoke the attorney of the older
generation, and about it hung the air of an unadorned workship. If one
compared it with the room in the same building where young Morgan
Wallifarro worked at a flat-topped mahogany table, one found the
difference between Spartan simplicity and sybarite elegance. But over
one book case hung an ancient and battered cavalry sword, a relic of the
days when the General had ridden with the "wizards of the saddle and the
sabre."

Just now he was, for the second time, reading a letter which seemed to
hold for him a peculiar interest.

* * * * *

"Dear General," it ran:

"Your invitation to come to Louisville and meet at your table that
coterie of intimates of whom you have so often spoken is one that tempts
me strongly--and yet I must decline.

"You know that my name is not McCalloway--and you do not know what it
is. I think I made myself clear on that subject when you waived the
circumstance that I am a person living in hermitage, because my life has
not escaped clouding. You generously accepted my unsupported statement
that no actual guilt tarnishes the name which I no longer use--yet
despite my eagerness to know those friends of yours, those gentlemen who
appeal so strongly to my imagination and admiration, I could not, in
justice to you or to myself, permit you to foist me on them under an
assumed name. I have resolved upon retirement and must stand to my
resolution. The discovery of my actual identity would be painful to me
and social life might endanger that.

"I'll not deny that in the loneliness here, particularly when the boy is
absent, there are times when, for the dinner co