to be detached. He
could be a great lawyer, but he preferred the quiet of obscurity. He
could be a rich man, but he preferred to be comparatively poor.

Said Mildred: "I suppose some woman--some disappointment in love--has
killed ambition, and everything like that."

"I don't think so," replied Baird. "The men who knew him as a boy say
he was always as he is now. He lived in the Arabian desert for two
years."

"Why didn't he stay?" laughed Mildred. "That life would exactly suit
him."

"It did," said Stanley. "But his father died, and he had to come home
and support his mother--until she died. That's the way his whole life
has been. He drifts in the current of circumstances. He might let
himself be blown away to-morrow to the other end of the earth and stay
away years--or never come back."

"But how would he live?"

"On his wits. And as well or as poorly as he cared. He's the sort of
man everyone instinctively asks advice of--me, you, his valet, the
farmer who meets him at a boundary fence, the fellow who sits nest him
in a train--anyone."

Mildred did not merely cease to dislike him; she went farther, and
rapidly. She began to like him, to circle round that tantalizing,
indolent mystery as a deer about a queer bit of brush in the
undergrowth. She liked to watch him. She was alternately afraid to
talk before him and recklessly confidential--all with no response or
sign of interest from him. If she was silent, when they were alone
together, he was silent, too. If she talked, still he was silent. What
WAS he thinking about? What did he think of her?--that especially.

"What ARE you thinking?" she interrupted herself to say one afternoon
as they sat together on the strand under a big sunshade. She had been
talking on and on about her career--talking conceitedly, as her subject
intoxicated her--telling him what triumphs awaited her as soon as she
should be ready to debut. As he did not answer, she repeated her
question, adding:

"I knew you weren't listening to me, or I shouldn't have had the
courage to say the foolish things I did."

"No, I wasn't," admitted he.

"Why not?"

"For the reason you gave."

"That what I said was--just talk?"

"Yes."

"You don't believe I'll do those things?"

"Do you?"

"I've GOT to believe it," said she. "If I didn't--" She came to a full
stop.

"If you didn't, then what?" It was the first time he had ever
flattered her with interest enough to ask he