ls, fresh for the
better part, well-dressed and exceptionally plain, were moving about the
floor. They seemed serene and stupid, chattering amiably through pauses
of the dance; and beneath, on the dais, Maule divined the presence of
Mrs. Manhattan, Mrs. Hackensack, Mrs. Bouvery, the Coenties, and other
ladies of maturer years. He was sure they were smiling and fanning
themselves. They always were. And presently, when his gloves were
buttoned, he fell to wondering what he was doing there. The incidents of
the evening had supplied him with a quantum of thought which he had no
desire to dispense in platitude. He was not at all in a mood to mingle
with those whose chiefest ambition was to be ornate. In another minute
he recovered his coat, and to the surprise of the door-keeper went down
through the ferns again. In the memory of man no one before had ever
come to a subscription-ball and deserted it two minutes later. He must
be ill, Johnson reflected, and went on collecting tickets.

Maule, however, was not in any sense indisposed, and as evidence of it
he walked far up Fifth Avenue, and on through the outskirts of the Park.
It was his intention, self-avowed and dominant, that he would come to
some decision in regard to Eden before that walk was done.

Like many another before and since, he found his brain most active when
his legs were in motion. In working up a case for a client, many a time
during an entire day he had reviewed dust-bound books of yellow hue, but
the one point, the clinching argument that was to arrest attention and
win the cause, came to him in the exhilaration of the open air. The
inspiration that was to cooerdinate conflicting data rarely visited him
at his desk. It was in the fatigue of the flesh that his mind became
clairvoyant. It was then that he found the logic for his brief. And on
this particular evening, as he strode along he kept telling himself that
in all his practice there had been nothing to him as important as this.
It was his own case that he was preparing; and did it result in failure,
how could he venture to undertake one in which the interest would be
feigned and the recompense coin? If he could not plead his own case and
win, then might he take his shingle down.

The facts, such, at least, as they appeared to him, were evangelical in
their simplicity. Here was a girl who had given him her heart's first
love, a girl who had exalted him into an ideal, and then, suspecting
him of infi