enly.
"Confess," she added, "that you are about to expatriate yourself in
this absurd fashion because Eleanor Milbourne means to marry Marston
Brent."

"Your acuteness has carried you too far," said he laughing, but not
quite naturally. "Miss Milbourne's matrimonial choice is nothing to
me. I have thought of this step for some time. General ----'s letter
is a reply to my application forwarded months ago. Yet now that the
answer has come," he went on, "I scarcely care to grasp the advantage
it offers. Indifference has infected me like a poison. I feel more
inclined to rust out on the old place than to sound 'Boots and saddle'
again."

"But why rust out?" she asked impetuously. "Are there not careers
enough open to you?" Then, after a minute, "Are there not other women
in the world besides Eleanor Milbourne?"

"Perhaps so," a little doggedly. "There are other stars in the heavens
besides Venus, but who sees them when she is above the horizon?"

"How kind and complimentary you are!" said Mrs. Lancaster with a
slight tone of bitterness in her voice.

"Forgive me," said he after a minute. "I am a fool on this subject,
and, like a fool, I always say more than I mean. No doubt there are
other women in the world even more beautiful and more charming than
Eleanor Milbourne, but they are nothing to me."

"In other words, you are determined to believe that the grapes above
your reach, instead of being sour, are the sweetest in existence."

"At least I harm only myself by such an hallucination, if it is an
hallucination."

"But you may harm yourself more than you imagine," said she with a
nervous cadence, in her voice. "For the sake of a hopeless passion for
a woman who has no more heart than my fan you will sacrifice more than
you are aware of--more, perhaps, than you can ever regain."

She laid her hand--a pretty, white hand, gleaming with jewels--on his
arm at the last words, and it was fortunate, perhaps, that she could
not tell with what an effort he restrained himself from shaking it
impatiently off. A quick feeling of repulsion came over him like an
electric shock. Hitherto he had been somewhat flattered, somewhat
amused, and only occasionally a little bored, by the favor which the
beautiful and wealthy young widow had so openly accorded him; but now
in a second he felt that thrill of disgust which always comes to a
sensitive man when he sees a woman step beyond the pale of delicate
womanhood. If he had been one