are foredoomed to disappointment. If, on the other
hand, she should indeed admire your style of rich, ample figure, I shall
deem it my duty to save you from her--at no matter what cost to myself.
I cannot allow you to link yourself for life to a woman without taste."

And then they rang the bell at the vast, much-bestuccoed portal of the
new house; and Anthony's heart, I think, for the minute stood still
within him. The door was opened, and he could look into the big, ugly,
familiar marble hall;--familiar still, and yet changed and strange, and
even beautified; with new soft hangings, and Persian carpets, and
flowers, and books, and bibelots about; with a new aspect of luxury and
elegance; with a strange new atmosphere of feminine habitation, that went
a little to Anthony's head, that called up clearer than ever the
dark-haired, strenuous-faced woman of the dog-cart, and turned his
imagination to visions and divinings of intimate feminine things. One
thought of chiffons, and faint, elusive perfumes, and the gleam and
rustle of silken garments; one heard soft voices, trills of feminine
laughter, the whispering of feminine secrets; one saw ladies in low
chairs, reading or embroidering by lamp-light.

So, for an instant, Anthony stood at Susanna's threshold, looking into
her antechamber, breathless almost with his sense of her imminence;--and
then the tall flunkey said, in the fastidious accents of flunkeydom, "Net
et _em_, sir;" and all my hero's high-strung emotion must spend itself in
the depositing of a card.

As they turned away, and the summer landscape again met him with its warm
breath and radiant smile, he gloomed at it savagely, from eyes of deep
rebuke, as at a thing that had beguiled him with false promises, wronged
and defrauded him. And he flew out petulantly at poor Adrian--

"Here's a pretty dance you 've led me, for the pleasure of a word with
Mr. Yellowplush."

"Oh?" said Adrian, taken aback. "I expected you 'd be relieved. You did
n't want to see them. And the exigencies of the case are satisfied by
leaving cards."

"I could have sent my card by you," growled Anthony.

"You 've had a lovely walk, with a lovely comrade, in lovely weather,"
said Adrian.

"The weather is simply brazen," Anthony declared.

V

Judged by the standards of a cit, countrymen, I believe, are generally
early risers; but even for a countryman, Anthony, next morning, rose at
an unlikely hour. The tall clock