him in some subtle way the
impression of her preference. By little and little he had played the
dangerous game that made such an appeal to his vanity.

The poets were true in their psychology when they pictured the distress
of mortal men beloved of goddesses: Tithonus and Aurora, Venus and
Adonis, Diana and Endymion. How could aught but tragedy result from
such loves as these? How could a mortal have dared to lift his eyes to
such a height unbidden? The gulf between Miss Wycliffe, beautiful,
rich, aristocratic, and Tom Emmet, the professional baseball player and
street-car conductor, was to his mind as impassable. It was she who
had first suggested the possibility of a bridge between them. His
conception of her mental states was as dim as our dreams of the
inhabitants of Mars. Of her ennui in that life which seemed to him all
lightness and pleasure, of the romance with which she invested his
commonplace days, of the possibilities she read in his personality, he
had no conception; but to the lingering of her fingers in his own, to
the glance of her eyes, the primitive man within him made response.

Love of adventure lured him on. The subtle courtship progressed apace,
and if any of Miss Wycliffe's friends noted her growing friendship with
the conductor, it was merely to praise her sweet and unassuming
humanity. At the end of that period of increasing intimacy, marked by
little incidents which no lover in the retrospect can ever arrange in
their proper sequence, the night of his marriage loomed in his memory,
every detail ineradicable. Their coincident absence from Warwick was
naturally unnoted; and who, in all the range of human probabilities,
would be present to see them meet at a certain day and hour on a
certain street corner in New York?

Life is a careless maker of plots. The villain did not appear to
shadow them to the obscure old church, to lurk in the darkening pews
and see them married, to watch their exit in the twilight as man and
wife, to observe from a safe distance their long talk on the corner of
the street, and, most inexplicable of all, to see her call a passing
cab and drive away in evident haste, perhaps in sudden alarm.

Emmet would never have brooked such desertion from a woman of his own
class, but the ascendancy which she had established over him from the
first was not materially shaken by the fact that she was now his wife.
He did not even know where she passed the night, while he wa