n he told
me who he was. I was a bit hot in the collar myself. I'd felt sorry for
him, because I thought he was a chap like myself, and he was up against
it. I know what that is, and I'd wanted to jolly him along a bit. When
he said his name was Mount Dunstan, and the place belonged to him,
I guessed he thought he was making a joke. So I got on my wheel and
started off, and then he got mad for keeps. He said he wasn't such a
damned fool as he looked, and what he'd said was true, and I could go
and be hanged."

Reuben S. Vanderpoel laughed. He liked that. It sounded like decent
British hot temper, which he had often found accompanied honest British
decencies.

He liked other things, as the story proceeded. The picture of the huge
house with the shut windows, made him slightly restless. The concealed
imagination, combined with the financier's resentment of dormant
interests, disturbed him. That which had attracted Selden in the
Reverend Lewis Penzance strongly attracted himself. Also, a man was a
good deal to be judged by his friends. The man who lived alone in the
midst of stately desolateness and held as his chief intimate a high-bred
and gentle-minded scholar of ripe years, gave, in doing this, certain
evidence which did not tell against him. The whole situation meant
something a splendid, vivid-minded young creature might be moved
by--might be allured by, even despite herself.

There was something fantastic in the odd linking of incidents--Selden's
chance view of Betty as she rode by, his next day's sudden resolve to
turn back and go to Stornham, his accident, all that followed seemed, if
one were fanciful--part of a scheme prearranged

"When I came to myself," G. Selden said, "I felt like that fellow in the
Shakespeare play that they dress up and put to bed in the palace when
he's drunk. I thought I'd gone off my head. And then Miss Vanderpoel
came." He paused a moment and looked down on the carpet, thinking. "Gee
whiz! It WAS queer," he said.

Betty Vanderpoel's father could almost hear her voice as the rest was
told. He knew how her laugh had sounded, and what her presence must
have been to the young fellow. His delightful, human, always satisfying
Betty!

Through this odd trick of fortune, Mount Dunstan had begun to see her.
Since, through the unfair endowment of Nature--that it was not wholly
fair he had often told himself--she was all the things that desire could
yearn for, there were many chances that w