ow was still rankling. None the less,
he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.

"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been
sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and
Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of;
have you?"

"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.

"What is it?"

"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is
good reason to believe he didn't want to come."

"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"

"Why--I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an
outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings
in time past--the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and
instant and sympathetic apprehension.

"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to
give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.

"Is that saying very much--or very little?"

"Very little, indeed. But it is only your askings that have been
lacking--not his good will."

"That was said like the David Kent I used to know. Are you really quite
the same?"

"I hope not," he protested gravely. "People used to say of me that I
matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true
saying. I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man
grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them."

"Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a--a somebody
who did not mature late?"

"No; I wasn't counting that among my lapses. An older man than I ever hope
to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer. I meant in other ways.
For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved
it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a
degree."

She shook her head.

"I don't know how you measure success; it is a word of so many, many
meanings. But I think you are your own severest critic."

"That may be; but the fact remains. It is only within the past few months
that I have begun to get a true inkling of things; to know, for example,
that opportunities are things to be compelled--not waited for."

She was looking away from him again.

"I am not sure that I like you better for your having discovered yourself.
I liked the other David Kent."

He smiled rather joylessly.

"Somebody has said that for every new point of view gained we have to
sac