d collected postage stamps and took
bicycles to pieces, waiting for the automobile to be invented. He's just
as much a part of a car as the steering-gear. I can't find out whether
he likes his job with me or not, or whether he feels any curiosity about
his sister. You can't find anything out from a Kronborg nowadays. The
mother was different."

Fred plunged into his coat. "Well, it's a queer world, Archie. But
you'll think better of it, if you go to New York. Wish I were going with
you. I'll drop in on you in the morning at about eleven. I want a word
with you about this Interstate Commerce Bill. Good-night."

Dr. Archie saw his guest to the motor which was waiting below, and then
went back to his library, where he replenished the fire and sat down for
a long smoke. A man of Archie's modest and rather credulous nature
develops late, and makes his largest gain between forty and fifty. At
thirty, indeed, as we have seen, Archie was a soft-hearted boy under a
manly exterior, still whistling to keep up his courage. Prosperity and
large responsibilities--above all, getting free of poor Mrs. Archie--had
brought out a good deal more than he knew was in him. He was thinking
tonight as he sat before the fire, in the comfort he liked so well, that
but for lucky chances, and lucky holes in the ground, he would still be
a country practitioner, reading his old books by his office lamp. And
yet, he was not so fresh and energetic as he ought to be. He was tired
of business and of politics. Worse than that, he was tired of the men
with whom he had to do and of the women who, as he said, had been kind
to him. He felt as if he were still hunting for something, like old
Jasper Flight. He knew that this was an unbecoming and ungrateful state
of mind, and he reproached himself for it. But he could not help
wondering why it was that life, even when it gave so much, after all
gave so little. What was it that he had expected and missed? Why was he,
more than he was anything else, disappointed?

He fell to looking back over his life and asking himself which years of
it he would like to live over again,--just as they had been,--and they
were not many. His college years he would live again, gladly. After them
there was nothing he would care to repeat until he came to Thea
Kronborg. There had been something stirring about those years in
Moonstone, when he was a restless young man on the verge of breaking
into larger enterprises, and when she was