-that there was
another rival for the cotillon, another, a younger man, who desired to
give her the special flowers for this special affair. The final division
of the young lady's favors was not wholly reassuring to Mr. Googe. As a
result of this awakening, he decided to remain in New York without
farther visits to Flamsted until the Van Ostends should have left the
city for the summer.

But in the course of the spring and summer he found it one thing to call
a halt and quite another to make one. The cross current of influence,
which had its source in Flamsted, was proving, against his will and
judgment, too strong for him. He knew this and deplored it, for it
threatened to carry him away from the shore towards which he was
pushing, unawares that this apparently firm ground of attainment might
prove treacherous in the end.

"Every man has his weakness, and she's mine," he told himself more than
once; yet in making this statement he was half aware that the word
"weakness" was in no sense applicable to Aileen. It remained for the
development of his growing passion for her to show him that he was
wholly in the wrong--she was his strength, but he failed to realize
this.

Champney Googe was not a man to mince matters with himself. He told
himself that he was not infatuated; infatuation was a thing to which he
had yielded but few times in his selfish life. He was ready to
acknowledge that his interest in Aileen Armagh was something deeper,
more lasting; something that, had he been willing to look the whole
matter squarely in the face instead of glancing askance at its profile,
he would have seen to be perilously like real love--that love which
first binds through passionate attachment, then holds through congenial
companionship to bless a man's life to its close.

"She suits me--suits me to a T;" such was his admission in what he
called his weak moments. Then he called himself a fool; he cursed
himself for yielding to the influence of her charming personality in so
far as to encourage what he perceived to be on her part a deep and
absorbing love for him. In yielding to his weakness, he knew he was
deviating from the life lines he had laid with such forethought for his
following. A rich marriage was the natural corollary of his
determination to advance his own interests in his chosen career. This
marriage he still intended to make, if possible with Alice Van Ostend;
and the fact that young Ben Falkenburg, an old playmate