mance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light she
suggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burned
black, like coals newly breaking into flame.

When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had
thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as a
man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be
contributors of several years' standing to the various magazines.
Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as
bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected
the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the
picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when
he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An
unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older
woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had
not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to
the conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would
have evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm's-length,
ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed.

Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamilton
did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging
westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimed
her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the
happiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one who
sought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.

This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted
his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallen
in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the role of
lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not
without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived the
test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney's compelling personality,
other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The
coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which
Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the
pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the
reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of
Hamilton's conduct,