of whom one expects
very little."

"How in heaven's name did a man like that catch your fancy in the
first place?" Hollister asked. He had never ceased to wonder about
that. Myra looked at him with a queer lowering of her eyes.

"What's the use of telling you?" she exclaimed petulantly. "You ought
to understand without telling. What was it drove you into Doris
Cleveland's arms a month after you met her? You couldn't know her--nor
she you. You were lonely and moody, and something about her appealed
to you. You took a chance--and drew a prize in the lottery. Well, I
took a chance also--and drew a blank. I'm a woman and he's a man, a
very good sort of a man for any woman who wants nothing more of a man
than that he shall be a handsome, agreeable, well-mannered animal.
That's about what Jim is. I may also be good-looking, agreeable,
well-mannered--a fairly desirable woman to all outward appearances--but
I'm something besides, which Jim doesn't suspect and couldn't understand
if he did. But I didn't learn that soon enough."

"When did you learn it?" Hollister asked. He felt that he should not
broach these intimately personal matters with Myra, but there was a
fascination in listening to her reveal complexes of character which he
had never suspected, which he should have known.

"I've been learning for some time; but I think Charlie Mills gave me
the most striking lesson," Myra answered thoughtfully. "You can
imagine I was blue and dissatisfied when we came here, to bury
ourselves alive because we could live cheaply, and he could hunt and
fish to his heart's content while he waited to step into a dead man's
shoes. A wife's place, you see, is in the home, and home is wherever
and whatever her lord and master chooses to make it. I was quite
conscious by that time that I didn't love Jim Bland. But he was a
gentleman. He didn't offend me. I was simply indifferent--satiated, if
you like. I used to sit wondering how I could have ever imagined
myself going on year after year, contented and happy, with a man like
Jim. Yet I had been quite sure of that--just as once I had been quite
sure you were the only man who could ever be much of a figure on my
horizon. Do you think I'm facile and shallow? I'm not really. I'm not
just naturally a sensation-seeker. I hate promiscuity. _He_ convinced
me of that."

She made a swift gesture towards Mills' vanishing figure.

"I ran across him first in London. He was convalescing from a leg
wou