than at any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here,
but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where
the temperature is high and pretty uniform.

At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not
arrested by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the
Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and
Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was
compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied
that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a
yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up
the Maine coast. "No, I thank you," Major Fairfax had said; "I know an
easier way to get to Bar Harbor."

Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the
sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many
compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of
business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in
an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer
amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this
life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was
not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker--but
everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker
if he keeps at it long enough--there was nothing unusual in this, only
it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the
restraint of the Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable
there than elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior
deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his
comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.

It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith
Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he
had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about
life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that, but
she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he would
spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put it to
himself in the way an Oriental would do, "That is finished"; but it was
an act done--a good act--and here was his world again, with a hundred
interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other
women and men, and affairs. Because a man w