penniless, too--his father has cast him
off. My girl, it's impossible. Listen to me. There's no one on earth
that would do more for you than I would--no one."

"Dear, dear friend!" she cried with a sudden impulse, and caught his
hand in hers and kissed it before he could draw it back. "You are so
true, and you think you are right. But, but"--her eyes took on a
deep, steady, far-away look--"but I will save him; and we shall not be
penniless in the end. Meanwhile I have seven hundred dollars a year of
my own. No one can touch that. Nothing can change me now--and I have
promised."

When he saw her fixed determination, he made no further protest, but
asked that he might help her, be with her the next day, when she was
to take a step which the wise world would say must lead to sorrow and a
miserable end.

The step she took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son
of a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways, and
owned a bank, and had so resented his son's inebriate habits that for
five years he had never permitted Jim's name to be mentioned in his
presence. Jim had had twenty thousand dollars left him by his mother,
and a small income of three hundred dollars from an investment which had
been made for him when a little boy. And this had carried him on; for,
drunken as he was, he had sense enough to eke out the money, limiting
himself to three thousand dollars a year. He had four thousand dollars
left, and his tiny income of three hundred, when he went to Sally
Seabrook, after having been sober for a month, and begged her to marry
him.

Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
had been no handsomer man in all America. Even yet he had a remarkable
face; long, delicate, with dark brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with grey-grey, though he
was but twenty-nine years of age.

When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with
her and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance. He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on
the Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time. Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had
gifts of a wonderful kind. He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine
and Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred oth