It was while travelling abroad that Lester came across, first at the Carlton in London and later at Shepheards in Cairo, the one girl, before Jennie, whom it might have been said he truly admired — Letty Pace. He had not seen her for a long time, and she had been Mrs. Malcolm Gerald for nearly four years, and a charming widow for nearly two years more. Malcolm Gerald had been a wealthy man, having amassed a fortune in banking and stock-brokering in Cincinnati, and he had left Mrs. Malcolm Gerald very well off. She was the mother of one child, a little girl, who was safely in charge of a nurse and maid at all times, and she was invariably the picturesque centre of a group of admirers recruited from every capital of the civilised world. Letty Gerald was a talented woman, beautiful, graceful, artistic, a writer of verse, an omnivorous reader, a student of art, and a sincere and ardent admirer of Lester Kane.

In her day she had truly loved him, for she had been a wise observer of men and affairs, and Lester had always appealed to her as a real man. He was so sane, she thought, so calm. He was always intolerant of sham, and she liked him for it. He was inclined to wave aside the petty little frivolities of common society conversation, and to talk of simple and homely things. Many and many a time, in years past, they had deserted a dance to sit out on a balcony somewhere, and talk while Lester smoked. He had argued philosophy with her, discussed books, described political and social conditions in other cities — in a word, he had treated her like a sensible human being, and she had hoped and hoped and hoped that he would propose to her. More than once she had looked at his big, solid head with its short growth of hardy brown hair, and wished that she could stroke it. It was a hard blow to her when he finally moved away to Chicago; at that time she knew nothing of Jennie, but she felt instinctively that her chance of winning him was gone.

Then Malcolm Gerald, always an ardent admirer, proposed for something like the sixty-fifth time, and she took him. She did not love him, but she was getting along, and she had to marry some one. He was forty-four when he married her, and he lived only four years — just long enough to realise that he had married a charming, tolerant, broad-minded woman. Then he died of pneumonia and Mrs. Gerald was a rich widow, sympathetic, attractive, delightful in her knowledge of the world, and with nothing to do except to live and to spend her money.

She was not inclined to do either indifferently. She had long since had her ideal of a man established by Lester. These whipper-snappers of counts, earls, lords, barons, whom she met in one social world and another (for her friendship and connections had broadened notably with the years), did not interest her a particle. She was terribly weary of the superficial veneer of the titled fortune-hunter whom she met abroad. A good judge of character, a student of men and manners, a natural reasoner along sociologic and psychologic lines, she saw through them and through the civilisation which they represented. “I could have been happy in a cottage with a man I once knew out in Cincinnati,” she told one of her titled women friends who had been an American before her marriage. “He was the biggest, cleanest, sanest fellow. If he had proposed to me I would have married him if I had had to work for a living myself.”

“Was he so poor?” asked her friend.

“Indeed he wasn’t. He was comfortably rich, but that did not make any difference to me. It was the man I wanted.”

“It would have made a difference in the long run,” said the other.

“You misjudge me,” replied Mrs. Gerald. “I waited for him for a number of years, and I know.”

Lester had always retained pleasant impressions and kindly memories of Letty Pace, or Mrs. Gerald, as she was now. He had been fond of her in a way, very fond. Why hadn’t he married her? He had asked himself that question time and again. She would have made him an ideal wife, his father would have been pleased, everybody would have been delighted. Instead he had drifted and drifted, and then he had met Jennie; and somehow, after that, he did not want her any more. Now after six years of separation he met her again. He knew she was married. She was vaguely aware he had had some sort of an affair — she had heard that he had subsequently married the woman and was living on the South Side. She did not know of the loss of his fortune. She ran across him first in the Carlton one June evening. The windows were open, and the flowers were blooming everywhere, odorous, with that sense of new life in the air which runs through the world when spring comes back. For the moment she was a little beside herself. Something choked in her throat; but she collected herself and extended a graceful arm and hand.

“Why, Lester Kane,” she exclaimed. “How DO you do! I am so glad. And this is Mrs. Kane? Charmed, I’m sure. It seems truly like a breath of spring to see you again. I hope you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Kane, but I’m delighted to see your husband. I’m ashamed to say how many years it is, Lester, since I saw you last! I feel quite old when I think of it. Why, Lester, think; it’s been all of six or seven years! And I’ve been married and had a child, and poor Mr. Gerald has died, and oh, dear, I don’t know what all hasn’t happened to me.”

“You don’t look it,” commented Lester, smiling. He was pleased to see her again, for they had been good friends. She liked him still — that was evident, and he truly liked her.

Jennie smiled. She was glad to see this old friend of Lester’s. This woman, trailing a magnificent yellow lace train over pale, mother-of-pearl satin, her round, smooth arms bare to the shoulder, her corsage cut low and a dark red rose blowing at her waist, seemed to her the ideal of what a woman should be. She liked looking at lovely women quite as much as Lester; she enjoyed calling his attention to them, and teasing him, in the mildest way, about their charms. “Wouldn’t you like to run and talk to her, Lester, instead of to me?” she would ask when some particularly striking or beautiful woman chanced to attract her attention. Lester would examine her choice critically, for he had come to know that her judge of feminine charms was excellent. “Oh, I’m pretty well off where I am,” he would retort, looking into her eyes; or, jestingly, “I’m not as young as I used to be, or I’d get in tow of that.”

“Run on,” was her comment. “I’ll wait for you.”

“What would you do if I really should?”

“Why, Lester, I wouldn’t do anything. You’d come back to me, maybe.”

“Wouldn’t you care?”

“You know I’d care. But if you felt that you wanted to, I wouldn’t try to stop you. I wouldn’t expect to be all in all to one man, unless he wanted me to be.”

“Where do you get those ideas, Jennie?” he asked her once, curious to test the breadth of her philosophy.

“Oh, I don’t know, why?”

“They’re so broad, so good-natured, so charitable. They’re not common, that’s sure.”

“Why, I don’t think we ought to be selfish, Lester. I don’t know why. Some women think differently, I know, but a man and a woman ought to want to live together, or they ought not to — don’t you think? It doesn’t make so much difference if a man goes off for a little while — just so long as he doesn’t stay — if he wants to come back at all.”

Lester smiled, but he respected her for the sweetness of her point of view — he had to.

To-night, when she saw this woman so eager to talk to Lester, she realised at once that they must have a great deal in co............