"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from
such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from--from us.
You're not now. It's----"

She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his
hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the
moonlight.

"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say
I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still
veneer."

It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been
afraid it was the truth.

"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if
you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years
ago. Betty! Betty!"

She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite
clear.

"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I--I----Listen!
What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from?
You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It
was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please----"

She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its
uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his
grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was
uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.

"Good-night, George."

He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away,
whispering breathlessly:

"Let me go now!"

He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across
the lawn away from him.

The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the
scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come
to kill.

When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest
of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers
in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and
fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his
eyes from filling with tears.

PART III

THE MARKET-PLACE

I

George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma
didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the
afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he
led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified
him for each other.

The man that had done most for Prin