As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the crowd.

"Now," said he, "will you please tell me what the——"

"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."

"But you promised——"

"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to hear."

They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began to walk northward.

Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he had agreed to explain to his friend.

"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street, pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's new—all new.—What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"

Holt grudgingly told him.

"Fresh?" asked Stainton.

"Five years old," said Holt.

"And that?—And that?"

Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.

"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.

"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"

"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years, he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is true of some cities and most of all of New York."

Holt slapped him on the back.

"Good old Jim!" said Holt.

The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.

"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't call me old. I'm not."

"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."

Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed, be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as "Old Stainton"!

"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man doesn't object to being called old."

The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat and hear the sad story of your life."

They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.

"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a suffering fellow-creature!"

Stainton considered.

"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."

"Of course."

"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of it in a moment of excitement——"

"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."

"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself——"

"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.

"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."

"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.

"You are the best judge of that, George."

Holt smiled.

"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton is sane."

"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."

"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions from what I am going to tell you."

Holt groaned.

"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake tell it!"

Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.

"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice, but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon of me."

"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.

Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.

"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own, has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."

"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."

"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I was afraid."

"Afraid? You!" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he said.

"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."

"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age, it looks to me as if——"

"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father—he drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned way—was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that time I saw him—I, a mere boy—become, day by day, a doting idiot.

"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.

"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end. Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my boy; old age.'"

Stainton wet his lips with wine.

"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an institution—which shows that I was very young indeed,—and so I simply nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.

"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It was—it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I kept saying to myself:

"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of the years to come.'"

Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.

"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."

Holt shuffled his feet.

"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.

"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed: "One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing, steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of controlling. These things go, slowly—very slowly—in each of us, and when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it——"

He stopped again, and again went on:

"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see anybody die, Holt?"

Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.

"No," he admitted.

"Not your parents?"

"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my first trip abroad."

"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that. Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees: it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.—There is no dignity in terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father——I was looking towards him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I remember the queer gurgle and the——

"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old age? I lay awake nights, I tell you—nights and nights—interminable nights, thinking, shaking.

"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There was a girl—it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day, when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into the cold black water we both went.

"It seemed to me that I was hours going down—down, and that I was still longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking again, and just then she—the girl I was in love with—flung an arm toward me. I shoved her away.

"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she neither forgot nor forgave.

"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She married the cousin and eighteen years ago—so I heard long after her marriage—she died as my mother had died—in childbirth."

Stainton slowly refilled his glass.

Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was accustomed to be interested.

"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.

"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do. First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"

"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."

"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.

"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."

"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves, walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."

"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"

"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death. I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did. I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I would deliberately court destruction—or appear to. The outcome was that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you admired me for."

"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd become a brave man."

"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever was."

"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did even better with the other scarecrow."

"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk——"

"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the dance-hall at Durango?"

"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got myself—you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights—into the shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers, is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully, but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig. "Tap that," he said.

He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it, at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the wine.

"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."

"Well?" asked Holt.

"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over twenty-five."

Holt nodded approval.

"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body; that's a cinch," said he.

"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate, I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I believe in the world; I believe in Man.'"

Holt smiled.

"Wait till you know New York," said he.

"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."

"And so——" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.

"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago; that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old sweetheart's daughter. And it was."

"What? Muriel Stannard?"

"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."

Holt whistled softly.

"Well?" asked he.

"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."

For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:

"But, Jim——"

There he stopped.

Stainton looked at him enquiringly.

"Yes?"

"But, Jim, you—you——Oh, what's the use!"

"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it is all simple enough."

Holt took a deep pull at his glass.

"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."

Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."

"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't, and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a what-do-y'-call-it—anchorite—and had opium-dreams without the fun of a smoke."

Stainton stiffened.

"I didn't ask your advice," said he.

"You wanted it," Holt ventured.

"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when you see it, you can't enjoy it."

"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes. "Perhaps I am, but that rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know, but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."

Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him, wanted to quote Cicero: "Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis." All that he said, however, was:

"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good woman in the face."

"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.

Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.

"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the entrÉe, somebody that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a man in livery."

"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To make clowns of your fellow men—really I think that's a sin against God."

"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two people who haven't anything to do but tell each other how much they love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin to want something else to talk about."

"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on: "There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained for love only."

"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle than it is now, and that's going some. What was it ordained for? Babies?"

"Yes."

"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't thinking babies."

"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."

"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here, Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without spoiling the game."

"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will object?"

"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."

"Then what do you mean?"

Holt interpreted.

"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."

Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better, seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.

"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this marrying-talk, aren't you?"

"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you refer to it in that way."

"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it won't do, you know. Really."

"Why not?"

"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."

Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the board.

"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."

"O, Hell!" said Holt.

Stainton's brows drew close together.

"I mean what I say," he declared.

"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what he said?"

"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed treatment—his treatment."

"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet—not by several thousand graveyards full."

"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances—really. I have my own feelings to go by."

"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels—perhaps."

"A man is as old as his arteries—and a few other units of his physical economy."

"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the—what is it?—units of her physical economy."

Stainton bit his under lip.

"A girl is mature at eighteen—mature enough. I won't talk of that, George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."

"You mean you believe you have."

"I know it."

"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've committed yourself, Jim."

Stainton shook his great head.

"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health—mental, moral, physical and every other way—understand me: every other way—than you were ten years ago."

"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody knows that; but you——"

"I have never been a waster."

"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."

"You don't mean that."

"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now and then."

"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."

"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your brain is used to 'em. So's your body—only more so. Well, what's going to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden—habits of a lifetime, mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"

"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under the age of forty-five."

"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good a girl of eighteen."

Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended gently. Stainton chuckled.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He hesitated. "That is, unless——" He frowned again, but only slightly—"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"

Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed heartily.

"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."

"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and will soon find a good woman to supply them. I thank you for your interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and, in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."

"Between fifty and eighteen?"

"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."

"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"

"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an irresponsible boy of her own years."

"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more irresponsible than the girl?"

"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."

"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed Holt. "Is that marriage?"

"An important part of it."

"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an easy business."

"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of a fool."

"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was already thickening his speech.

"All," said Stainton.

"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd better reckon a little on God, Jim?"

Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their libations.

"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"

Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups, however, were sometimes theological.

"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.

"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices made infinite."

"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really 'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"

"Reason," suggested Stainton.

"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for—for—lemme see: for reason."

"Philosophy?"

"To quick for that, too."

"Instinct, perhaps."

"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does something—high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in—partly. Not altogether. Partly's something else; something from—from——" Holt groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."

Stainton rose.

"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.

"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.

"It is late," repeated Stainton.

Holt shook his head.

"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things. Birds mating in—in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."

"Come on," said Stainton.

But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's neck.

"I'm—I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'—an' God knows I love you." Easy tears were running down his puffed cheeks. "Only you are old, Jim. You know you are."

Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.

"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way, you know."

Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.

"So you really mean—mean to do—to do——? You know what I mean?"

"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that night: "I intend to marry her."