u say? Like to go?"

For a dazed moment Florian stared at him. "Why, yessir. Yes, sir,
I'd--I'd like to go--very much." And he coughed to hide his joy and
terror.

And two weeks later he went.

The thing swept the store like a flame. In an hour everyone knew it from
the shipping-room to the roof-restaurant. Myra saw him the day he left.
She was game, that girl.

"I hope you're going to have a beautiful time, Mr. Sykes."

"Thanks, Myra." He could afford to be lenient with her, poor little
girl.

She ventured a final wretched word or two. "It's--it's wonderful of Mr.
Heath and--Miss Heath--isn't it?" She was rubbing salt into her own
wound and taking a fierce sort of joy in it.

"Wonderful! Say, they're a couple of God's green footstools, that's what
they are!" He was a little mixed, but very much in earnest. "A couple of
God's green footstools." And he went.

He went, and Myra watched him go, and except for a little swelling gulp
in her white throat you'd never have known she'd been hit. He was going
with Jessie Heath. Now, Myra had no illusions about those things. Old
man Heath's wife, now dead, had been a girl with no money and no looks,
and yet he had married her. If Jessie Heath happened to take a fancy to
Florian, why----

Myra's little world stood still, and in it were small voices, far away,
asking for 6-1/2-B; and have you it in brown, and other unimportant
things like that.

Ten minutes after the train had started Florian Sykes knew he shouldn't
have come. He had suspected it before. He kept saying to himself, over
and over: "You've always wanted a mountain trip, and now you're going to
have it. You're a lucky guy, that's what you are. A lucky guy." But in
his heart he knew he was lying.

In the first place, they were all so glib with their altitudes, and
their packs, and their trails, and their horses and their camps. It was
a rather mixed and raggle-taggle group that Miss Jessie Heath had
gathered about her for this expedition to the West. They ranged all the
way from a little fluffy witless golden-haired girl they all called Mud,
for some obscure reason, and who had been Miss Heath's room-mate at
college, surprisingly enough, to a lady of stern and rock-bound
countenance who looked like a stage chaperon made up for the part. She
was Miss Heath's companion in lieu of Mrs. Heath, deceased. In between
there were a couple of men of Florian's age; two youngsters of
twenty-one or two who talked of Ha