nished with the tints of mid-October. Trees and shrubs were
flame-colored, copper-colored, wine-colored, differing only in their
diffuseness of hue from the concentrated gorgeousness of amaranth,
canna, and gladiolus. The sounds of the city were deadened here to a
dull rumble, while the vibrancy of the autumn afternoon excited his
taut nerves.

At the top of the hill he paused. There was no one in sight who could
possibly respond to his quest. He wondered for a second if this were
not a hint to him to abandon it. But doing that he would abandon his
revenge, and by abandoning his revenge he would concede everything to
this girl who had so bitterly wronged him. Ever since he could
remember they had been pals, and for at least ten years he had vaguely
thought of asking her to marry him when it came to his seeking a wife.
It was true, the hint she had thrown out, that he had felt himself in
no great need of a wife till his mother had died some eighteen months
previously, and he had found himself with a cumbrous old establishment
on his hands. That had given the decisive turn to his suit. He had
asked her. She had taken him. And since then, in the course of less
than ten weeks, if they had had three quarrels they had had thirty. He
had taken them all more or less good-naturedly--till to-day. To-day
was too much. He could hardly say why it was too much, unless it was
as the last straw, but he felt it essential to his honor to show her
by actual demonstration the ruin she had made of him.

Looking about him for another possibility, he noticed that at the spot
where the path, having serpentined down the little hillside, rejoined
the main footway there was a bench so placed that its occupant would
have a view along several avenues at once. Since it was obviously a
vantage point for such strategy as his, he had taken the first steps
down toward it when a little gray figure emerged from behind a group
of blue Norway spruces. She went dejectedly to the bench, sitting down
at an extreme end of it.

Wrought up to a fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood
with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips
pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a "drab." All the
shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the
bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within
the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the
hint of dropping on the seat not from