e was at the dinner, and what happened there you
shall hear presently.

Arthur Beguelin was the Angel's best man. He, too, was Aubrey's sole
attendant, for we had no ushers.

Artie was neither clever nor stupid, but that gentle, amiable cross
between the two which made him fair game for a designing girl. He was
better than clever. He was magnetic, as Cary and Flora found to their
sorrow.

His father had been enormously wealthy, but his vast property had
slipped out of his keeping, and had become involved in a lawsuit of
such dimensions and such hopeless duration that Artie might just as
well consider himself as a ward in chancery, and be done with it.

This loss of fortune, however, instead of demoralizing him, had been
his salvation. It set him to work, and made a man of him. He never
believed that he would inherit a dollar of his father's, so he prepared
to make his own way in the world, regardless of golden hopes.

But not so his friends. His prospects, hazy as they were, made him
most interesting to match-making mothers, and as his indomitable
courage made him interesting to the other and better sort, you will see
that Artie was pursued rather more than most eligible young men. This
pursuit had made him wary and cautious. Had he been more
introspective, it would have embittered him; but it shows his amiable
modesty when I assert that Artie only fought shy of the more aggressive
anglers, whose landing-nets were always in evidence, while he never
refused to swim nimbly around and even nibble at the bait of the more
tactful.

I have described him thus carefully, because it just shows how the most
wary of men can be caught napping by the right kind of cleverness, and
which was the right girl for him it took both us and him some time to
discover.

At first sight, it seemed to be Flora. As Aubrey said: "It was all off
with him from the moment he saw her." He had been the stroke in the
Yale crew during two glorious years of victory, and, like most men who
gloried in the companionship of athletic girls, he elected to fall in
love with Flora, who, the first time she met him, wanted to know the
difference between a putter and a bunker, which so tickled Artie that
he put in two good hours explaining it to her.

Cary had known Flora for some time, but two girls could not have been
more unlike. Cary was rich, courted, and flattered. She had only to
express a wish to have it granted, yet, strange anomaly, sh