ith that voice of mentality which
sounds the loudest, to the consciousness, of any voice on earth. He
frowned, then he laughed a little, and began mounting a fine new
butterfly specimen. "Other men marry and spend their hard earnings in
that way, on love," said he. "Why should I not spend mine after this
fashion if I choose?"

That noon, as he passed out of the store on his way home to dinner,
Ina and Charlotte came out of the dressmaker's opposite. They looked
flushed and happily excited. Charlotte carried a large parcel. They
rushed past without seeing him at all, as he gained the opposite
sidewalk. He walked along, grave and self-possessed. Nobody seeing
him would have dreamed of his inward perturbation, that spiritual
alienation as secret as the processes of the body.

Nobody could have suspected how his fond thought and yearning
followed one of those small, hurrying, girlish figures. In a way the
man, even with his frustrated aims in the progress of life, was so
superior to the little, unconscious feminine thing whose chief assets
of life were her youth and innocence, and even those of slight weight
against the man's age and innocence, that it seemed a pity.

It was not a case of pearls before swine, but seemingly rather of
pearls before canary-birds or butterflies, which would not defile
them, but flutter over them unheedingly.

However, it may be better to cast away one's pearls of love before
anything, rather than keep them. Anderson, walking along home to his
dinner in the summer noon, loving foolishly and unreasonably this
young girl who would never, probably, place the slightest value on
his love, was not actively unhappy. After he had turned the corner of
the street on which his house stood he heard the whistle of the
noon-train, and soon the carriages from the station came whirling in
sight.

Samson Rawdy came first, driving a victoria in which sat the
gentleman who had been pointed out to him as Ina Carroll's _fiance_.
He glanced at him approvingly, and the thought even was in his mind
that had this stranger been going to marry Charlotte, instead of her
sister, he could have had nothing to say against his appearance.
Suddenly, Major Arms in the victoria looked full at him and bowed,
raising his hat in his soldierly fashion. Anderson was surprised, but
returned the salutation promptly.

"Who was that gentleman bowing to you?" his mother asked, as he went
up the front steps. She was standing on the p