st and most aggravatingly
beautiful photographs to young Stuart, it was no sign that she cared
especially for him.

How much young Stuart cared for Miss Delamar, however, was an open
question and a condition yet to be discovered. That he cared for some
one, and cared so much that his imagination had begun to picture the
awful joys and responsibilities of marriage, was only too well known
to himself, and was a state of mind already suspected by his friends.

Stuart was a member of the New York bar, and the distinguished law
firm to which he belonged was very proud of its junior member, and
treated him with indulgence and affection, which was not unmixed with
amusement. For Stuart's legal knowledge had been gathered in many odd
corners of the globe, and was various and peculiar. It had been his
pleasure to study the laws by which men ruled other men in every
condition of life, and under every sun. The regulations of a new
mining camp were fraught with as great interest to him as the
accumulated precedents of the English Constitution, and he had
investigated the rulings of the mixed courts of Egypt and of the
government of the little Dutch republic near the Cape with as keen an
effort to comprehend as he had shown in studying the laws of the
American colonies and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

But he was not always serious, and it sometimes happened that after he
had arrived at some queer little island where the native prince and
the English governor sat in judgment together, his interest in the
intricacies of their laws would give way to the more absorbing
occupation of chasing wild boar or shooting at tigers from the top of
an elephant. And so he was not only regarded as an authority on many
forms of government and of law, into which no one else had ever taken
the trouble to look, but his books on big game were eagerly read and
his articles in the magazines were earnestly discussed, whether they
told of the divorce laws of Dakota, and the legal rights of widows in
Cambodia, or the habits of the Mexican lion.

Stuart loved his work better than he knew, but how well he loved Miss
Delamar neither he nor his friends could tell. She was the most
beautiful and lovely creature that he had ever seen, and of that only
was he certain.

Stuart was sitting in the club one day when the conversation turned to
matrimony. He was among his own particular friends, the men before
whom he could speak seriously or foolishly wit