ngaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to a beautiful brown
with red flashing from its waves; and her skin was a clear olive pallid
but healthy. And she had shot up into a tall, slender young woman; her
mother yielded to her pleadings, let her put her hair into a long knot
at the back of her neck and wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.

When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each found
the other grown into a new person. She thought him a marvel of wisdom
and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel of ideal
womanhood--gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging him, yet narrow
to primness in her ideas of what she herself could do, and withal
charming physically. He would not have cared to explain how he came by
the capacity for such sophisticated judgment of a young woman. They
were to be married as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately
to be admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills--the largest
in the state of Indiana.

He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his sophomore
and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and busy stream of
gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor--of drinking and gambling and
wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was noted that the fast young men of
Saint X--so every one called Saint Christopher--were going a more rapid
gait. Those turbulent fretters against the dam of dullness and stern
repression of even normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal.
But never before had they been so daring, so defiant.

One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley
Braddock's rooms. Braddock, only son of the richest banker in Saint X,
had furnished the loft of his father's stable as bachelor quarters and
entertained his friends there without fear that the noise would break
the sleep and rouse the suspicions of his father. That night, besides
Braddock and Dumont, there were Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will. As
they played they drank; and Dumont, winning steadily, became offensive
in his raillery. There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell,
accidently toppled down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up with
a broken arm and leg.

By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of
deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective successors
of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The Episcopalian and
Methodist ministers preached against Dumont, that "importer of S