aising the fallen, succoring the helpless, and fighting the
battles of the oppressed.

Farther along, when she should have quite forgotten the _Belle Julie's_
deck-hand, he would meet Miss Farnham on an equal social footing; and
the conclusion of the whole matter should be a triumphant demonstration
to her by their refutable logic of good deeds and a life well-lived that
in his case, at least, the end justified the means.

Just here, however, there was an unresolved discord in the imaginative
theme. It was struck by the reflection that since he could never take
her fully into his confidence her approval would always lack the seal of
completeness. She knew the masquerading deck-hand, and what he had done;
and she would know Griswold the benefactor, and what he meant to do. But
until she could link the two together, there could be no demonstration.
Though he should build the bastion of good deeds mountain high, it could
never figure as a bastion to her unless she might come to know what it
was designed to defend.

Having a sensitive ear for the imaginative harmonies, the unresolved
discord annoyed him. The effort to eliminate it brought him face to face
with a blunt demand, a query that was almost psychic in its clear-cut
distinctness. Why did these forecastings of the future always lead him
up to the closed door of this young woman's approval and leave him
there?

For one whose experience had all been bought on a rising market,
Griswold was singularly heart-whole and normal in his attitude toward
women. Beautiful women he had met before, among them a few who had lent
themselves facilely to the idealizing process; but in each instance it
was the artistic temperament, and not the heart, that was touched and
inspired. Was Charlotte Farnham going to prove the exception? Since he
could ask the question calmly and with no perceptible quickening of the
pulses, he concluded that she was not. Nevertheless----

The train of reflective thought was broken abruptly by the seating of
two other supper guests at his table; a big-framed man in the grizzled
fifties, and a young woman who looked as if she might have stepped the
moment before out of the fitting-rooms of the most famous of Parisian
dressmakers.

Griswold's supper was served, and for a time he made shift to ignore the
couple at the other end of the table. Then an overheard word, the name
of the town which he had chosen as his future abiding place, made him
suddenly obs