that for a month
her name and his own had been linked together from Portland to San
Francisco. But the girl he married did not forget. She never
understood what the public saw in Aline Proctor. That Aline was the
queen of musical comedy she attributed to the fact that Aline knew the
right people and got herself written about in the right way. But that
she could sing, dance, act; that she possessed compelling charm; that
she "got across" not only to the tired business man, the wine agent,
the college boy, but also to the children and the old ladies, was to
her never apparent.

Just as Aline could not forgive the rejected suitor for allowing her to
love him, so the girl he married never forgave Aline for having loved
her husband. Least of all could Sally Winthrop, who two years after
the summer at Bar Harbor married Herbert Nelson, forgive her. And she
let Herbert know it. Herbert was properly in love with Sally Winthrop,
but he liked to think that his engagement to Aline, though brief and
abruptly terminated, had proved him to be a man fatally attractive to
all women. And though he was hypnotizing himself into believing that
his feeling for Aline had been the grand passion, the truth was that
all that kept her in his thoughts was his own vanity. He was not
discontented with his lot--his lot being Sally Winthrop, her millions,
and her estate of three hundred acres near Westbury. Nor was he still
longing for Aline. It was only that his vanity was flattered by the
recollection that one of the young women most beloved by the public had
once loved him.

"I once was a king in Babylon," he used to misquote to himself, "and
she was a Christian slave."

He was as young as that.

Had he been content in secret to assure himself that he once had been a
reigning monarch, his vanity would have harmed no one; but,
unfortunately, he possessed certain documentary evidence to that fact.
And he was sufficiently foolish not to wish to destroy it. The
evidence consisted of a dozen photographs he had snapped of Aline
during the happy days at Bar Harbor, and on which she had written
phrases somewhat exuberant and sentimental.

From these photographs Nelson was loath to part--especially with one
that showed Aline seated on a rock that ran into the waters of the
harbor, and on which she had written: "As long as this rock lasts!"
Each time she was in love Aline believed it would last. That in the
past it never had lasted did not