Mr. Coleman Van Duyn lurched heavily up the wide steps that led to the main corridor of the Potowomac apartments and took the elevator upstairs. He asked for mail and sat down at the desk in his library with a frowning brow and protruding jowl. Affairs down town had not turned out to his liking this morning. For a month everything seemed to have gone wrong. He was short on stocks that had struck the trade-winds, and long on others that were hung in the doldrums; his luck at Auction had deserted him; his latest doctor had made a change in his regimen; a favorite horse had broken a leg; and last, but not by any means the least, until this afternoon Fate had continued to conspire to keep him apart from Miss Jane Loring.

They had met casually several times at people’s houses and once he had talked with her at the Suydam’s, but the opportunities for which he planned obstinately refused to present themselves. He had finally succeeded in persuading her to ride with him to-day, and after writing a note or two, he called his man and dressed with particular care. Mr. Van Duyn’s mind was so constructed that he could never think of more than one thing at a time; but of that one thing he always thought with every dull fiber of his brain, and Miss Loring’s indifference to his honorable intentions had preyed upon him to the detriment of other and, perhaps, equally important interests.

Mr. Van Duyn was large of body and ponderous of[110] thought, and his decisions were only born after a prolonged and somewhat uncertain period of gestation. It took him an hour to order his dinner, and at least two hours to eat (and drink) it. And so when at the age of five and thirty he had reached the conclusion that it was time for him to marry, he had set about carrying his resolution into effect with the same solemn deliberation which characterized every other act of his life. He had been accustomed always to have things happen exactly as he planned them, and was of the opinion, when he followed the Lorings to Canada, that nothing lacked in the proposed alliance to make it eminently desirable for both of the parties concerned. Matches he knew were no longer made in Heaven and an opportunist like Henry K. Loring could not long debate upon the excellence of the arrangement.

Miss Loring’s refusal of him up at camp, last summer, had shocked him, and for awhile he had not been able to believe the evidence of his ears, for Mrs. Loring had given him to understand that to her at least he was a particularly desirable suitor. When he recovered from his shock of amazement, his feeling was one of anger, and his first impulse to leave the Loring camp at once. But after a night of thought he changed his mind. He found in the morning that Miss Loring’s refusal had had the curious effect of making her more desirable, more desirable, indeed, than any young female person he had ever met. He was in love with her, in fact, and all other reasons for wanting to marry her now paled beside the important fact that she was essential to his well being, his mental health and happiness. He did not even think of her great wealth as he had at first done, of the fortune she would bring which would aid materially in providing the sort of an establishment a married Van Duyn must maintain. In[111] his cumbrous way he had decided that even had she been penniless, she would have been necessary to him just the same.

He had stayed on at camp, accepting Mrs. Loring’s advice that it would not be wise to take her refusal seriously. She was only a child and could not know the meaning of the honor he intended to confer. But in New York her indifference continued to prick his self-esteem, and for several weeks he had been following her about, sending her flowers and losing no chance to keep his memory green.

And so, he examined his shiny boots with a narrowing and critical eye, donned a favorite pink silk shirt and tied on a white stock into which he stuck a fox-head pin. He had put on more flesh in the last three years than he needed, and his collar bands were getting too tight; but as he looked in the mirror of his dressing-stand, he was willing to admit that he was still the fine figure of a man—a Van Duyn every inch of him. It was in the midst of this agreeable occupation that Mr. Worthington entered, a corn-flower in his buttonhole and otherwise arrayed for conquest. Van Duyn looked over his shoulder and nodded a platonic greeting.

“Tea-ing it, Bibby?”

“Oh, yes. Might as well do that as sit somewhere. Just stopped in on my way down.” Worthington’s apartment was above. And then, “Lord Coley, you are filling out! Riding?”

“No,” grinned the other, “going to pick strawberries on the Metropolitan Tower. Don’t I look like it?”

Worthington smiled. Van Duyn’s playfulness always much resembled that of a young St. Bernard puppy.

“I thought you’d given it up. Her name, please.”

Mr. Van Duyn refused to reply.

“It’s the Loring girl, isn’t it?” Worthington queried[112] cheerfully. “I thought so. You lucky devil!” He touched the tips of two fingers and thumb to his lips, and with eyes heavenward laid them upon his heart. “She’s an angel, a blue-eyed angel, fresh from the rosy aura of a cherubim. Oh, Coley, what the devil can she see in you?”

“Don’t be an ass, Bibby,” Van Duyn grunted wrathfully.

“I’m not an ass. I’m in love, you amatory Behemoth, in love as I’ve never been before—with an angel fresh from Elysium.”

“Meaning Miss Jane Loring?”

“Who else? There’s no one else,” dolefully. “There never has been any one else—there never will be any one else. You’re in love with her, too; aren’t you, Coley?”

“Well, of all the impudence!”

“Nonsense. I’m only living up to the traditions of our ancient friendship. I’m giving you a fair warning. I intend to marry the lady myself.”

The visitor had lit a cigarette and was calmly helping himself to whisky. Van Duyn threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“You! Good joke. Haw! You’ve got as many lives as a cat, Bibby. Been blowing out your brains every season for fifteen years.” He struggled into his coat and squared himself before the mirror. “Wasting your time,” he finished dryly.

“Meaning that you are the chosen one? Oh, I say, Coley, don’t make me laugh. You’ll spoil the set of my cravat. You know, I couldn’t care for her if I thought her taste was as bad as that. Not engaged are you?”

“Oh, drop it,” said the other. “Remarks are personal. Miss Loring is fine girl. Fellow gets her will be lucky.” He had poured himself a drink, but paused in the[113] act of taking it, and asked, “Haven’t seen Gallatin lately, have you?”

“No—nobody has—since that night at the Club. He’d been sitting tight—and God knows that’s no joke! Good Lord, but he did fall off with a thud! Been on the wagon six months, too. He ought to let it alone.”

“He can’t,” said Van Duyn grimly.

“Well, six months is a good while—for Phil—but he stuck it out like a little man.” And then ruminatively, “I wonder what made him begin again. He’d been refusing all the afternoon. Came in later with his jaw set—white and somber—you know—and started right in. It’s a great pity! I’d like to have a talk with Phil. I’m fond of that boy. But he’s so touchy. Great Scott! I tried it once, and I’ll never forget the look he gave me. Never again! I’d as leave try a curtain lecture on a Bengal tiger.”

“What’s the use? We’ve got troubles of our own.”

“Not like his, Coley. With me it’s a diversion, with you it’s an appetite, with Phil it’s a disease. That’s why he went to Canada this summer. By the way, you were in the woods with the Lorings, of course you heard about that girl that Phil met up there?”

“No,” growled the other.

“Seems to be a mystery. Percy Endicott says——”

Van Duyn set his glass on the table with a crash that broke it, then rose with an oath.

“Think I’m going to listen to that rubbish?” he muttered. “Who cares what happened to Gallatin? I don’t, for one. As for Percy, he’s a lyin’, little gossipin’ Pharisee. I don’t believe there was any girl——”

“But Gallatin admits it.”

“D—— Gallatin!” he roared.

Worthington looked up in surprise, but rose and[114] kicked his trousers legs into their immaculate creases.

“Oh, if you feel that way about it—” He took up his silk hat and brushed it with his coat sleeve. “I think I’ll be toddling along.”

“Oh, don’t get peevish, Bibby. You like Phil Gallatin. Well, I don’t. Always too d—— starchy for me anyway.” He paused at the table in the library while he filled his cigarette case from a silver box. Then he examined Worthington’s face. “You didn’t hear the girl’s name mentioned, did you?” he asked carelessly.

“Oh, no, even Gallatin didn’t know it.” Worthington had put on his hat and was making for the door. “Of course it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Van Duyn followed, his man helping them into their overcoats.

“Can’t drop you anywhere, can I, Bibby? I’ve got the machine below.”

“No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

On the ride uptown Coleman Van Duyn glowered moodily out at the winter sunlight. He had heard enough of this story they were telling about Phil Gallatin and the mysterious girl in the woods. He alone knew that the main facts were true, because he had had incontestible evidence that the mysterious girl was Jane Loring. All the circumstances as related exactly tallied with his own information received from the two guides who had brought her into Loring’s camp. And in spite of his knowledge of Jane’s character, the coarse embroidery that gossip was adding to the tale had left a distinctly disagreeable impression. Jane Loring had spent the better part of a week alone with Phil Gallatin in the heart of the Canadian wilderness. Van Duyn did not like Gallatin. They had known each other for years, and an appearance of fellowship existed between them, but in all tastes save one[115] they had nothing in common. He and Gallatin had locked horns once before on a trifling matter, and the fact that the girl Van Duyn intended to marry had been thrown upon the mercies of a man of Gallatin’s stamp was gall and wormwood to him. But when he thought of Jane he cursed the gossips in his heart for a lot of meddlers and scandal-mongers. If he knew anything of human nature—and like most heavy deliberate men, he believed his judgment to be infallible, Jane was the blue-eyed angel Mr. Worthington had so aptly described, “fresh from the rosy aura of a cherubim.” But there were many things to be explained. One of the guides that had found her had dropped a hint that it was no guide’s camp that she had visited in the woods, as she had told them at camp. And why, if she had been well cared for there, had she fled? What relation............