hought of her had pervaded his
life, as the sunshine pervades a landscape! Yet not like the sunshine;
for sunshine is fructifying, and his life had been singularly fruitless.
There was no shirking the truth, that the year he had spent reading law
in her father's office, the year he had discovered that his old friend
and playmate was the girl of his choice, had been a wasted year. In all
that did not directly concern her he had dawdled, and Dorothy knew and
resented it.

He remembered how, on one occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr
to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorish manners, who was
cutting a dash with a newly acquired fortune.

"Dorothy," Wakefield asked abruptly, the next time he got speech of
her,--it was at the Assembly and she had only vouchsafed him two
dances,--"Dorothy, what do you like about that boor?"

"In the first place he isn't a boor," she answered. "He's as
gentlemanlike as possible."

"Supposing he is, then! That's a recommendation most of us possess."

She gave him a scrutinizing, almost wistful look. How dear she was,
standing there in the brilliant gas-light, fresh and natural in her
ball-dress and sparkling jewels as she had been when her hair hung down
in a big braid over her gingham frock.

"You gentlemanlike? That's something you could never be, Harry,--because
you are a gentleman. But that's all you are," she added, with a sudden
impatience that checked his rising elation.

"I don't see that there was any call for snubbing," he retorted angrily.
He was often angry with Dorothy; that was part of the old
good-fellowship he had used to value so much, but which seemed so
insufficient now.

"Snubbing? I thought I made you a very pretty compliment," she answered,
with a little caressing tone that he found illogically comforting.

"You haven't told me why you like this gentlemanlike boor," he
persisted.

"I should think anybody might see that! I like him because he amounts to
something; because he has made a fortune, if you insist. It takes a
_man_ to do that!"

Upon which, before Wakefield had succeeded in framing a suitable retort,
Dorr came up, with a ponderous joke, and claimed a promised waltz.

Well! Dorr need not be in such thundering spirits! He had no chance with
her at any rate!

And only a few months later it turned out that he, Harry Wakefield, had
as little chance as Dorr.

At this point in his reflections Wakefield's elbows began to feel roug