d to Feilding some of his earlier days, when he was
a student in Paris. There had been a supper in Max's room that ended at
daylight--no worse in its features than dozens of others in the
Quartier--to which an intimate friend of the doctor's had been invited,
and upon which, as Max heard afterward, the doctor had commented rather
severely.

Max realized, therefore, but too well that the distinguished
physician--known now over half the State--understood him, and his
habits, and his kind as thoroughly as he did his own ease of
instruments. He realized, too, that there was nothing about his present
appearance or surroundings or daily life that could lead so thoughtful
a man of the world as Dr. John Cavendish, of Barnegat, to conclude that
he had changed in any way for the better.

And yet this young gentleman could never have been accused of burning
his candle at both ends. He had no flagrant vices really--none whose
posters were pasted on the victim's face. Neither cards nor any other
form of play interested him, nor did the wine tempt him when it was
red--or of any other color, for that matter, nor did he haunt the
dressing-rooms of chorus girls and favorites of the hour. His innate
refinement and good taste prevented any such uses of his spare time.
His weakness--for it could hardly be called a vice--was narrowed down
to one infirmity, and one only: this was his inability to be happy
without the exclusive society of some one woman.

Who the woman might be depended very largely on whom he might be thrown
with. In the first ten years of his majority--his days of poverty when
a student--it had been some girl in exile, like himself. During the
last ten years--since his father's death and his inheritance--it had
been a loose end picked out of the great floating drift--that social
flotsam and jetsam which eddies in and out of the casinos of Nice and
Monte Carlo, flows into Aix and Trouville in summer and back again to
Rome and Cairo in winter--a discontented wife perhaps; or an unmarried
woman of thirty-five or forty, with means enough to live where she
pleased; or it might be some self-exiled Russian countess or
English-woman of quality who had a month off, and who meant to make the
most of it. All most respectable people, of course, without a breath of
scandal attaching to their names--Max was too careful for that--and yet
each and every one on the lookout for precisely the type of man that
Max represented: one never hap