oller, what are your prospects?"

"I have none."

"Then you don't expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon
her means."

"I expect to do nothing of the kind!" cried Burnamy. "I should be
ashamed--I should feel disgraced--I should--I don't ask you--I don't ask
her till I have the means to support her--"

"If you were very fortunate," continued the general, unmoved by the
young fellow's pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself
lived upon his wife's means as long as she lived, and then upon his
daughter's, "if you went back to Stoller--"

"I wouldn't go back to him. I don't say he's knowingly a rascal, but
he's ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I
behaved badly to him, and I'd give anything to undo the wrong I let him
do himself; but I'll never go back to him."

"If you went back, on your old salary," the general persisted
pitilessly, "you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up
to twenty-five hundred a year."

"Yes--"

"And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the
scale she is used to? I don't speak of your mother, who has the first
claim upon you."

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the
question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on. "You ask me to give you my daughter when you
haven't money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a
stranger--"

"Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe," Burnamy protested. "You have
known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago
will tell you--"

"A stranger, and worse than a stranger," the general continued, so
pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost
smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. "It isn't a question of
liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so
do the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself.
You've done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little
of you, in spite of our three months' acquaintance; and that little
is--But you shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential
employ of a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself."

"I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But
it wasn't done maliciously; it wasn't done falsely; it was done
inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it
wasn't; I could have prevented, I could hav