-which
he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which
seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional
interest in the person referred to.

"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard
my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"

"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented
indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:
"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"

"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up
the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.

"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.
"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't
you think so?"

"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."

He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her
obtuseness the more inexplicable!

"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."

"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour
kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You
know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"

He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head
and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man
with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment
of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,
and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of
inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had
deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the
visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good
clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes
perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged
him.

"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted
him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the
new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's
not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"

There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of
resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept
him back to t