ance. At least he need do no harm, and he would have wealth
enough to do much good. It was in thoughts like these that hitherto he
had found consolation. But on this particular morning he looked for them
anew, and the search was fruitless. Not one of the old consolations
disclosed the slightest worth. He stood before himself naked in his
nothingness. The true knowledge of his incompetence had never come home
to him before--but now it closed round him in serried arguments, and in
the closing shut out all hope of her. Who was he, indeed, to pretend to
such a girl?

To win her, he told himself, one must needs be a conqueror, one who has
coped with dangers and could flaunt new triumphs as his lady's due. Some
soldier bearing a marshal's baton back from war, some hero that had
liberated an empire or stolen a republic for himself, some prince of
literature or satrap of song, someone, in fact, who, booted and spurred,
had entered the Temple of Fame, and claimed the dome as his. But he!
What had he to offer? His name, however historical and respected, was an
accident of birth. Of the wealth which he would one day possess he had
not earned a groat. And, were it lost, the quadrature of the circle
would not be more difficult than its restoration. And yet, and
yet--though any man she could meet might be better and wiser and
stronger than he, not one would care for her more. At least there was
something in that, a tangible value, if ever there were one. There was
every reason why she should turn her back, and that one reason, and that
one only, why she should not. But that one reason, he told himself, was
a force in itself. The resuscitation of hope was so sudden that the
blood mounted to his temples and pulsated through his veins.

He left the bed in which his meditations had been passed. "They say
everything comes to him who waits," he muttered, and then proceeded to
dress. He took a tub and got himself, absent-mindedly, into a morning
suit. "I don't believe it," he exclaimed, at last, "the world belongs to
the impatient, and I am impatient of her."

Tristrem was in no sense a diplomatist. In his ways there was a candor
that was as unusual as it is delightful; yet such is the power of love
that, in its first assault, the victim is transformed. The miser turns
prodigal, the coward brave, the genius becomes a simpleton, and in the
simpleton there awakes a Machiavelli. Tristrem passed a forenoon in
trying to unravel as cruel a prob