ble the members of any vigilant
organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never
lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for
business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers
say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and
this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even
become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring 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