And Winn, glancing into the bright eyes that had once lured him to a
heartache, held her hand a moment and then bade her good night.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

For weeks Winn lived an aimless life without occupation, which to him
meant misery. He walked the streets to be jostled by people in a hurry,
and wished that he also was. He looked into shop windows where dummies
stood clad in beautiful garments, and wondered how Mona would look if
robed in such. He met people hurrying home from their work at night and
almost envied them. In his club he felt so ill at ease that games,
conversation, and even the raillery of Jack Nickerson bored him. He had
a pleasant home, where his aunt always thought of his comfort; he
escorted her to church with regularity; read the daily papers; called on
Ethel occasionally, to find her always the same sweet temptation. She
neither allured nor repelled, but was always the same piquant and yet
sympathetic friend, well poised and sensible, who judged all men and
spoke of them as a mixture of nobility and selfish conceit in unequal
parts, with the latter predominating. To Winn she sometimes talked as
though he were still a big boy who needed guidance, and then again as if
he were more than mortal and out of place in a bad world.

"You are discontented," she said to him one evening, "and out of your
sphere among the city men. You take right and wrong too seriously and
are like an eagle caged with jackdaws. City men are such in the main,
thinking more about the cut of their coats, the fit of their linen, and
color of their ties than of aught else. You are as unlike them as when
you came here a big boy with countryisms clinging to you and the scent
of new mown hay perfuming your impulses; you were always out of place
here, and the three months on that island has made you more so."

It was a truthful and yet somewhat flattering portrayal of Winn as he
really did seem to her, but it only added to his discontent.

"What you say may be true enough," he answered, "but what shall I do? I
can't go into an office again and be content, the taste of being my own
master on the island has spoiled me for that. I would go into some
business if only I had the capital, but I haven't; and I wouldn't ask my
aunt to loan me any, even under the existing circumstances."

"I wish I could advise you," she replied in the sympathetic tone so
easily at her command. "I certainly would if I could. But