ed at the clean, strong lines of the jaw and
forehead. A good fellow. A very good fellow. He wondered why Edith
wouldn't take him? ("It couldn't make any difference to me," he thought;
"and I want her to be happy.")

"Johnny," he said, "you can say, 'Mind your business,' before I begin,
if you want to. But I don't think anybody's cutting you out? Better
'try, try again.'"

Johnny took his pipe from his mouth, bent forward to shake the ashes out
of it, and stared into the fire. Then he said, clearing his throat once
or twice: "I've bothered her, 'trying,' I thought I'd start on a new
tack."

"You'll get her yet!" Maurice encouraged him. He wondered, as he spoke,
how he could speak so lightly, urging old Johnny to go ahead and make
another stab at it, and, maybe, "get her"! He wondered if he was looking
at things the way the dead look at the living? He was not, he thought,
suffering, as he had suffered in those first moments when Eleanor had
flung the truth at him. "You'll get her yet," he said, vaguely.

Johnny took out his tobacco pouch, and began to fill his pipe, poking
his thumb down into the bowl with slow precision, then holding it on a
level with his eyes and squinting at it, to make sure it was smooth; he
seemed profoundly engrossed by that pipe--but he put it in his mouth
without lighting it.

"Well, I don't know," he said; "I haven't an awful lot of hope that I'll
ever get her. But I thought I'd try this way. Maybe, if she doesn't see
me for a year...."

"There's nobody ahead of you, anyway," Maurice said, absently.

"Well, I don't know," John Bennett said again.

His voice was so harsh that Maurice's preoccupation sharpened into
uneasy attention. Johnny's hopes and fears had not really touched him.
His encouraging platitudes were only a way of smothering his own
thoughts. But that, "Well, I don't know--" woke a keenly attentive fear:
_was_ there anybody else? ("Not that that could make any difference to
me.")

"You 'don't know'?" he said; "how do you mean? You think there _is_
somebody?"

Johnny Bennett was silent; he had an impulse to say "you are several
kinds of a fool, old man." But he was silent.

"Why, Great Scott!" Maurice protested. "Buried up there in the
mountains, she hardly knows a fellow--except you!--and me," he added,
with a laugh.

"I think," said John, huskily, "she has ... some kind of an ideal up her
sleeve. And I don't fill the bill. Imagination, you know. A--a sort of
Sir