hs of his easy chair. It was the sort of night to
throw, occasionally, another log on the fire and watch the flames dance
higher--illuminate with their glowing radiance the dim corridors and the
vast and stately apartments of a _Chateau en Espagne_. What an addition
those new pictures are to the noble gallery! And the vast library with
the windows opening on the Moorish court! But some of the tapestries need
renovating, those priceless tapestries!

[Illustration]

Then, surfeited with gazing on so much beauty and splendor, one turns to
more homely comforts, and while the logs sink to a bed of glowing ashes,
dreams over one's favorite essays, or skims the cream of the last new
novel.

It was such an evening as this that Hayden had planned; but plans, as
immemorial experience has taught us, but never quite convinced us, "gang
aft a-gley," and Robert's were no exception to the rule. Between him and
the open page before him, he saw continually the face of Marcia Oldham.
The sweet, wistful, violet eyes gazed earnestly at him, the delicately
cut mouth with the dimple in one corner smiled at him and his book
presently dropped from his fingers and lay unheeded on the rug while he
dreamed dreams and saw visions. Gradually, his thoughts wandered from the
future and its hopes to the past, and for the first time since his return
the old wanderlust stole over him, the wanderlust temporarily lulled and
quiescent, but always there, that passion for change which was so
integral a part of his nature. But he no longer wished for new scenes
with no companionship but that of a man friend or so, he dreamed instead
of a season of wandering with Marcia, with her to travel the uncharted,
with her to "follow October around the earth." He wondered if the lovely
lady of the silver butterfly cared only to breathe the air of cities, or
if she, like himself, delighted in gazing upon the strange and
unaccustomed, in getting,

"Out in the world's wide spaces,
Where the sky and the desert meet,
Where we shake from our feet all traces
Of the dust of the city street?"

He believed she did. He could not be so strongly conscious of some secret
and indefinable sympathy existing between them if their tastes were not
similar. Ah well, whatever her tastes might be he could gratify
them,--providing, of course, that she chose to look kindly upon him, and
if things only came his way, a little, just a little, and surely he had
reason to b