himself realized, which made it natural that his friends should be
deceived. He was a bachelor not from choice, as he would have the world
think, but from circumstance, and the absence of home and wife and
children represented the one lack in an otherwise entirely satisfactory
career. It was the only thing his father had not provided for him, and
he himself had not possessed sufficient energy to take the initiative.

The conversation on the way home from the Club brought matters fairly
before Huntington's mental vision. One moment it seemed monstrous that
his friend of so many years' standing should deliberately announce his
intention of entering into an estate from which he himself must perforce
be barred, yet while the treachery seemed blackest Huntington found
himself acknowledging that it was the proper step for Cosden to take,
and admiring that characteristic which saved him from committing his own
mistake. Yet, if years before he had only--but herein lies the most
extraordinary evidence of Huntington's sentimentality. If the story were
told--and it can scarcely be called a story--it would begin and end like
Sidney Carton's in one long "what might have been."

It was the mention of the name quite as much as the subject of their
conversation which started in motion all that mysterious machinery which
forces the present far out of its proper focus, disregards the future,
and brings into the limelight those events of the past which the
intervening years have magnified. No one can really explain it, and the
wise make no attempt. "Marian Thatcher," Cosden had said. She was Marian
Seymour when he had known her, twenty-odd years before, and the Marian
he had known married a man named Thatcher right under the very noses of
the legion of admirers, himself included, who fluttered about her. Of
course it was only a coincidence, this combination of names, for the
girl Cosden spoke of was only twenty; but just as substances combined by
chemists in their laboratories begin to ferment and produce unwonted
conditions, so did the combination of those two names start in
Montgomery Huntington's brain that series of mental pictures which
caused him to forget that the hour had come when sane persons of his age
and disposition sought repose.

This was not the first time that he had thus outraged Nature, and for
the selfsame cause. Not a year of the more than twenty had passed
without at least one mental pilgrimage to the shrine which