ortcomings might figure as angelic
virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?

To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted
anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be
the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging
seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and
crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of
modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of
the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above
a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial,
two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as
the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting,
his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if
anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told
himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the
anchorages had never come.

Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the
flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate
which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her
was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had
been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but
oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most
frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood
well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had
heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened
porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely
arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward
through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler
adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather
disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the
destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as
certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and
vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen
in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer
change.

As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion,
a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose
most alluring charm was her many-