attack upon her heart was direct and unhalting. He fended off
other suitors with a kind of animal jealousy. He drove her even from so
unimportant a family friend as Grant Adams.

Gradually, as the autumn deepened into winter and Tom Van Dorn found
himself spending more and more time in the girl's company he had
glimpses of his own low estate through the contrast forced upon him
daily by his knowledge of what a good woman's soul was. The
self-revelation frightened him; he was afraid of what he saw inside
himself in those days, and there can be no doubt that for a season his
soul was wrestling with its doom for release. No make-believe passion
was it that spurred him forward in his attack upon the heart of Laura
Nesbit. Within him, there raged the fierce battle between the spirit of
the times--crass, material and ruthless--and the spirit of things as
they should be. It was the old fight between compromise and the ideal.

As for the girl, she was in that unsettled mind in which young women in
their first twenties often find themselves when sensing by an instinct
new to them the coming of a grown-up man with real matrimonial
intentions. Given a girl somewhat above the middle height, with a slim,
full-blown figure, with fair hair, curling and blowing about a pink and
white face, and with solemn eyes--prematurely gray eyes, her father
called them--with red lips, with white teeth that flashed when she
smiled, and with a laugh like the murmur of gay waters; given a more
than usual amount of inherited good sense, and combine that with a world
of sentiment that perfect health can bring to a girl of twenty-two; then
add one exceptionally fascinating man of thirty--more or less--a
handsome young man; a successful man as young men go, with the
oratorical temperament and enough of a head to be a good consulting
lawyer as well as a jury lawyer with more than local reputation; add to
the young man that vague social iridescence, or aura or halo that young
men wear in glamor, and that old men wear in shame--a past; and then let
public opinion agree that he is his own worst enemy and declare that if
he only had some strong woman to take hold of him--and behold there are
the ingredients of human gunpowder!

Doctor Nesbit smelled the burning powder. Vainly he tried to stamp out
the fire before the explosion.

"Bedelia," said the Doctor one day, as the parents heard the girl
talking eagerly with the young man, "what do you make out of thi