taste for each other's society.

Having been forced, by an unkind Fate, into a position in which each saw
in the other a possible rival, any neutrality was out of the question.
It had not taken Anstice long to discover that Cheniston had so far
recovered from the loss of Hilda Ryder as to consider the possibility of
making another woman his wife; nor had Cheniston's eyes been less keen.

He had very quickly discovered that Anstice was in love with pretty
Iris; and instantly a fire of opposition sprang into fierce flame in his
heart; and to himself he said that this man, having once deprived him of
his chosen woman, should not again be permitted to come between him and
his desire.

True, he did not profess to love Iris Wayne as he had loved Hilda Ryder;
for no other woman in the world could ever fill the place in his life
left vacant by that untimely shot in the dawn of an Indian day.

Until the hour in which he learned of Miss Ryder's tragic death Bruce
Cheniston had been an ordinary easy-going youth, cleverer in some ways
than the average man, on a level with most as regarded his outlook on
life and its possibilities. He had never been very deeply moved over
anything. Things had always gone smoothly with him, and he had passed
through school and college with quite passable success and complete
satisfaction in himself and his surroundings. His love for Hilda Ryder
was the best and highest thing in his whole life; and in his attempt to
become what she believed him to be he rose to a higher mental and moral
stature than he had ever before attained.

And then had come the tragedy which had deprived him at once of the girl
he had loved and the incentive to a better, worthier manhood which her
love had supplied. For her sake he could have done much, could have
vanquished all the petty failings, the selfish weaknesses which marred
his not otherwise unattractive character; but when Hilda Ryder vanished
from his life he lost something which he never regained.

He grew older, harder, more cynical. His sunny boyishness, which had
effectually masked the cold determination beneath, dropped from him as a
discarded garment; and the real man, the man whose possibilities Hilda
Ryder had dimly presaged and had resolved to conquer, came to the
surface.

He felt, perhaps naturally, that he had a grudge against Fate; and the
immediate result was to eliminate all softness from his character, and
replace such amiable weakness by a har