ve, she must play what
cards she had to win.

During his summer visit at Narragansett Cowperwood had not been long
disturbed by the presence of Braxmar, for, having received special
orders, the latter was compelled to hurry away to Hampton Roads. But
the following November, forsaking temporarily his difficult affairs in
Chicago for New York and the Carter apartment in Central Park South,
Cowperwood again encountered the Lieutenant, who arrived one evening
brilliantly arrayed in full official regalia in order to escort
Berenice to a ball. A high military cap surmounting his handsome face,
his epaulets gleaming in gold, the lapels of his cape thrown back to
reveal a handsome red silken lining, his sword clanking by his side, he
seemed a veritable singing flame of youth. Cowperwood, caught in the
drift of circumstance--age, unsuitableness, the flaring
counter-attractions of romance and vigor--fairly writhed in pain.

Berenice was so beautiful in a storm of diaphanous clinging garments.
He stared at them from an adjacent room, where he pretended to be
reading, and sighed. Alas, how was his cunning and foresight--even
his--to overcome the drift of life itself? How was he to make himself
appealing to youth? Braxmar had the years, the color, the bearing.
Berenice seemed to-night, as she prepared to leave, to be fairly
seething with youth, hope, gaiety. He arose after a few moments and,
giving business as an excuse, hurried away. But it was only to sit in
his own rooms in a neighboring hotel and meditate. The logic of the
ordinary man under such circumstances, compounded of the age-old
notions of chivalry, self-sacrifice, duty to higher impulses, and the
like, would have been to step aside in favor of youth, to give
convention its day, and retire in favor of morality and virtue.
Cowperwood saw things in no such moralistic or altruistic light. "I
satisfy myself," had ever been his motto, and under that, however much
he might sympathize with Berenice in love or with love itself, he was
not content to withdraw until he was sure that the end of hope for him
had really come. There had been moments between him and
Berenice--little approximations toward intimacy--which had led him to
believe that by no means was she seriously opposed to him. At the same
time this business of the Lieutenant, so Mrs. Carter confided to him a
little later, was not to be regarded lightly. While Berenice might not
care so much, obviously Braxma