don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
utterly. And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry
so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated. It
seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
himself. It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
was his just by--by instinct.

"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
almost without a word of explanation to him. Nobody ever cited Garry
as a shining example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an
unspeakable record! Her family made the match--the newspapers call it
a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
Well, he had them--and she married him. And Garret Devereau dropped
out of the world for a long time.

"It was a year before he came back. People had already begun to talk
about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.
O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more. I never knew
before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
man as I know Garry to be. It's not just his face and his rather
dreadful silence. It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
shows it, pitifully. It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
could so deliberately commit suicide.

"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
But I'll always care for him deeply. That's why I have asked him up
this fall. Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
have to go back into the woods before then? I'm going to have a party
for some week-end guests--a masque dance. Garry needs his friends now,
more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you,
please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"

Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
clear-eyed boy. He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
finenesses of him whom they had known together. Steve nodded his
comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then. But
they found conversation somehow less easy after that. It was not until
they had tra