at last, despite the malignant thrusts and obstacles
of destiny, this gutter snipe of Gotham had come to a certain estate.

When I left, he accompanied me slowly to the beach.

"You ought to like it here," I said. "After all, the city could never
have given you so much."

"No," he said. Wide-eyed, he took in the azure immensity of the sea.
"No. Here a guy has got time to think, think, without any hurry or
worry.--I been thinking, Dole, a lot. I ain't going to say nothing about
it, but Dole, I b'lieve I got an idea coming along. No flivver this
time. A real, sure-fire hunch. Something that'll go big in the city.
Big!"

And so I left him there in the shadow of the mountain, staring at the
impassable sea.

KINDRED[19]

By HARRIET MAXON THAYER

(From _The Midland_)

If I had had a less positive sense of revulsion for him, I might have
been able to treat him with more contempt, certainly with more
indifference. It was a part of Con Darton's power that those who knew
him should waver in their judgments of him, should in turn reproach
themselves for their hardness of heart and then grow angry at their own
lack of assuredness. Perhaps it was the disquieted gray eyes in the lean
leathery face, or the thin-lipped mouth that I had seen close so foxly
after some sanctimonious speech, or the voice which, when not savage
with recrimination, could take on a sustained and calculated intonation
of appeal,--perhaps these things aroused my interest as well as my
disgust. Certain it is that other men of a like feather, sly, irascible,
gone to seed in a disorderly Illinois town, I should have avoided. I
made the excuse of Lisbeth, and it was true that her welfare, first as
his daughter and later as the wife of my friend, was very dear to my
heart. Yet that could not explain the hypnotism the man had for me,
befogging, as it sometimes did, an honest estimate.

There were, of course, moments of certainty. I recalled village
anecdotes of bitter wrangles among the Dartons with Con always coming
out best. They were a quarreling pack of sentimentalists. From all
accounts Miss Etta must have been at that time a rugged girl of
twenty-eight, of striking, if ungentle, appearance; and only the
unsteadied sensibilities and the too-ready acrimony could have
foreshadowed the large blatant woman she was to become, a woman who
alternated between a generous flow of emotion on the one hand and an
unimaginative hardness on the other. Only