the upshot of the matter was that he went to the girl and
told her--all these ideas of his; quit, came West; left the road open to
the other man. Oh, yes, there was another man, of course; one
thoroughly approved of by the family. Quaint, wasn't it? Perhaps a
little overly judicial. But then that was his way. Slow-moving and sure.
He saw the girl at dusk in the garden of her family's country place;
near a sun-dial, or some other appropriately romantic spot. She kissed
him nobly on the forehead, I suppose--the young girl gesture; and told
him she wasn't worthy of him and to forget her.

"'Oh, no, I won't,' he said. 'Not for a minute! And in five years--or
ten--you'll come to me. You'll find out.' And then he added something
else: 'Whenever things have reached their limit,' he said, 'think of me
with all your might. Think hard! There's something in that sort of
stuff, you know, where two people love each other. Think hard!' Then he
went away."

A log snapped and fell with a soft thud to the ashes beneath. Burnaby
was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.

When he spoke again, it was with a slow precision as if he were trying
with extreme care to find the right words.

"You see," he said, "he had as an added foundation for his
faith--perhaps as the main foundation for it--his knowledge of the other
man's character; the character of the man the girl married. It was"--he
spoke more hastily and, suddenly raising his head, looked at Mary
Rochefort, who, sunk back in her chair, was gazing straight ahead of
her--"an especial kind of character. I must dwell on it for a moment,
and you must mark well what I say, for on it my parable largely depends.
It was a character of the sort that to any but an odalisk means eventual
shame; to any woman of pride, you understand, eventually of necessity a
broken heart. It was a queer character, but not uncommon. Outwardly very
attractive. Mackintosh described it succinctly, shortly, as we sat there
by the fire. He spoke between his teeth--the faint wind stirring the
desert sand sounded rather like his voice." Burnaby paused again and
reached over for a cigarette and lit it deliberately.

"He was a man," he continued, "who apparently had the faculty of making
most women love him and, in the end, the faculty of making all women
hate him. I imagine to have known him very well would have been to leave
one with a mental shudder such as follows the touching of anguilliform
material; snake-li