ncomfortable scene, when old Ellwell turned toward him.

"Don't let me scare you, young man," he said, with his regulation
courtesy, the air of the old Ellwells. Thornton shook hands with him,
noticing his bloodshot eyes, the puffy folds under the eyelids, the
general bloat of an ill-regulated human animal. "Are you going before
dinner?" Ellwell continued. Thornton murmured something about duties
and engagements. Ellwell bowed and lifted his hat. Miss Ellwell
advanced as if to say good-by, then stopped. Her face was sad.
Thornton's horse wheeled impatiently. He grasped the saddle, and a
moment later he was down the road out into the self-respecting fields
and woods, where all had the sanctified peace of a starlight night.

"She did not like to ask me again, poor girl," he murmured.

V

Whether Jarvis Thornton would have yielded again of his own accord to
the impulse to travel Four Corners-ward remained unsolved. He had on
hand some experiments that he was undertaking for a paper which he had
to deliver at the close of the month. His day of dissipation seemed to
spur him on once more along the accustomed path, and only in the few
lazy moments at the end of the day did his mind recur to the still
meadows baked in the June sun, and to the woman who had tempted him
into a dangerous world. One evening, when he was speculating
luxuriously on that day of impulse, Roper Ellwell knocked at his door
and entered.

Ellwell had never been there before. Jarvis Thornton had seen him from
time to time at the A. O.; but a fast set, the Roper-Ellwell
crowd, having made the club over into a drinking and poker-playing
establishment, he had ceased to go there frequently. Ellwell was
considerably battered, Thornton noticed, as he invited him, coolly, to
take a seat and help himself to a cigar. He had come to pour himself
out, and a dirty enough story there was to tell. He had been dropped
from Camberton for general inadequacy; but that was the least of his
troubles.

"I could go to the old man and tell him that," he explained, "his own
record at Camberton wasn't any too fine, and he has a grudge against
the old place. I am in here for a lot of money, which he will have to
stand. But----"

Thornton looked at him unsympathetically, without commenting on his
story. Why should he be troubled with the Ellwell excesses in the
fourth generation? He failed yet to see the point to all these
confidences.

"Your break-up is fairly co