ung mountaineer held the sombreness of his
humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he
said. "I hate to have to tell him--that the first fight I ever went into
was a--Waterloo."

"Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your
Austerlitz later--but I know General Prince will want to see you." The
lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince
that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office."

As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne--Miss Masters?"

At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a
glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the
memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's
taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her
after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin."

"Yes, sir, I'll miss her."

So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver
a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.

* * * * *

The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned
savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer
example of the Old South--which was now the New South as well; but one
friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange
world of its loneliness.

At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer
battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize--only the
bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and
others--that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to
conceal--until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.

He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and
manners.

Morgan was consistently polite--but it was a detached politeness which
often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat.
Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the
habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel
Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated
people--though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness.
As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which
Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as "the conduct of a gentleman
reduced to its simplest and most natural terms."

But for