s
Bridge, Forbes Gurney."

Stephanie merely pouted moodily.

"How you talk! Bliss Bridge, Gardner Knowles! I admit I like them all,
but that's all I do do. They're just sweet and dear. You'd like Lane
Cross yourself; he's such a foolish old Polly. As for Forbes Gurney,
he just drifts up there once in a while as one of the crowd. I
scarcely know him."

"Exactly," said Cowperwood, dolefully; "but you sketch him." For some
reason Cowperwood did not believe this. Back in his brain he did not
believe Stephanie at all, he did not trust her. Yet he was intensely
fond of her--the more so, perhaps, because of this.

"Tell me truly, Stephanie," he said to her one day, urgently, and yet
very diplomatically. "I don't care at all, so far as your past is
concerned. You and I are close enough to reach a perfect
understanding. But you didn't tell me the whole truth about you and
Knowles, did you? Tell me truly now. I sha'n't mind. I can understand
well enough how it could have happened. It doesn't make the least bit
of difference to me, really."

Stephanie was off her guard for once, in no truly fencing mood. She was
troubled at times about her various relations, anxious to put herself
straight with Cowperwood or with any one whom she truly liked.
Compared to Cowperwood and his affairs, Cross and Knowles were trivial,
and yet Knowles was interesting to her. Compared to Cowperwood, Forbes
Gurney was a stripling beggar, and yet Gurney had what Cowperwood did
not have--a sad, poetic lure. He awakened her sympathies. He was such
a lonely boy. Cowperwood was so strong, brilliant, magnetic.

Perhaps it was with some idea of clearing up her moral status generally
that she finally said: "Well, I didn't tell you the exact truth about
it, either. I was a little ashamed to."

At the close of her confession, which involved only Knowles, and was
incomplete at that, Cowperwood burned with a kind of angry resentment.
Why trifle with a lying prostitute? That she was an inconsequential
free lover at twenty-one was quite plain. And yet there was something
so strangely large about the girl, so magnetic, and she was so
beautiful after her kind, that he could not think of giving her up.
She reminded him of himself.

"Well, Stephanie," he said, trampling under foot an impulse to insult
or rebuke and dismiss her, "you are strange. Why didn't you tell me
this before? I have asked and asked. Do you really mean to say that
you car