lay truant, a word with his wife, when
he met her, would set him straight, and he would at once communicate
with me.

At all events, as we shook hands, looking out across the sapphire bay,
we both pretended that the lapse of his memory was a trivial thing. I
did not affect indifference for its subject, but I assured him that
inasmuch as I had still some days of voyage ahead of me it was quite
probable that the name might come to his memory again before I landed in
'Frisco, and I made him promise that if such was the case he would cable
the important surname to the St. Francis. There was still the bare
chance, he reminded me, that the rumored engagement had not after all
resulted in marriage. He fell back on those adages calculated to convey
last hope to the forlorn, and since there was nothing else to be done I
accepted his lame comfort in the spirit that prompted it. Possibly now
that I had before me the prospect of learning the identity of the lady I
really welcomed a few days of uncertainty. At least while they lasted I
should have the shred of possible hope and could be shaping my
resolution to face the answer. Long after one has told himself that
there is no longer a chance of hope he none the less clings to a shred,
and when I arrived at the hotel St. Francis and inquired for a
cablegram, I think that relief outweighed disappointment as the clerk
ran through the miscellaneous sheaf of messages and shook his head. "I
don't find anything," he said, and strange as it may seem, I felt like a
reprieved man who still faces dreaded news but has not actually received
it.

Before that breakfast at the club my life had been merely prefatory; a
sum of dilute emotions. At Harvard I had taken my degree and won my "H"
on the gridiron. Since then I had gone through my days just missing
every goal. There had been little even of innocuous flirtation and
nothing of grand passion.

I had tried to paint, and my masters discovered promise which came to
nothing. I adventured into the practise of law and went briefless. I
essayed music without distinction. I finally decided that my genius was
seeking its goal along mistaken avenues. It should be mine to move men
and women to smiles and tears by the magic of pen and ink and printed
word. But the editors were on duty. They received my assaults on a
phalanx of blue pencils. They flung me back, defeated and unpublished.

Perhaps had I fallen in love, it might have been different. Had so