is
elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way
of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a
cosmopolitan air.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man
habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught
the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor,
how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was
conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was
capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as
though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how
well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill
the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its
subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.

This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard
to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning
of dinner--the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another
man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He saw now that it
was a field on which he never _could_ have won. Within "the best Boston
society" he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been
a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and
chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little
in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods. That he was no
longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated
somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow
down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from
the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the
nightingale for the moon.

* * * * *

By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some
of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion
say:

"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear
in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may
depend upon it he had a reason."

"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed--"the reason of being hard up.
The trouble lay in its not being good enough."

"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."

"But not for any one else. He was drummed out. There wasn't a soul in
the regiment to speak to him. We heard that he to