y to the column which contained the day's reports of the
stock market. He knew already that the Chericoke Valley Central in which
he had invested had jumped thirty points and was still advancing, but he
read the printed statements with the exhaustless interest with which a
lover might return to a love letter he had already learned by heart. His
faith in the Chericoke Valley Central stock was strong, and he meant to
keep a close grip on it for some time to come.

Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the
staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item
inserted among the Western news. It was a brief notice of his divorced
wife's marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an
annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy. It
was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he
suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now
belong to another man. After the ten years since they had separated was
she still so "awfully splendid?" he wondered, had she kept her figure,
which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still
wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette? "Thank heaven I'm
well out of it at any rate," he commented with feeling. "That comes of a
man's marrying before he's twenty-five. He's turned cynic before he gets
to forty"; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable
and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a
man's freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability. The most
blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his
recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an
honest contradiction--he had known one emotion more blissful still and
that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.

Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat
peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his
four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a
melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion
upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife. The memory of
her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in
him an agreeable and purely physical regret--the kind of regret which is
strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he
admitted with his accusto