There was no doubt in my mind that Penelope Blight was engaged to marry Talcott. They announced the fact when they rode the length of the Avenue together in a hansom. But had I questioned the meaning of their appearing thus in public I could not long have cheered myself with vain hope, for the papers next morning blazoned the news to all the world. That they printed it under great staring head-lines was not surprising to me, for to me this fact transcended all others in importance. Beside it the rumblings of war in the Balkans, the devastating flood in China, or the earthquake which wrecked a southern city were trifles. So to my distorted view the papers were filled with the announcement of my overwhelming misfortune. Only by the greatest effort could I drag myself from reading and rereading to my humdrum task. Before me in black and white was the last chapter in my own story, the story which had begun that day when I went fishing. Every line of it, couched in the hackneyed phrases of the business, was a cutting blow, and yet I must return again and again to the beating. Had Rufus Blight been a poor man, a worthy man whose sole claim to consideration lay in his having discovered some balm for human ills, then a paragraph would have sufficed for the announcement of his niece's engagement. But he was a millionaire; he lived in one of the largest houses in town, and his niece was the greatest catch of the day, measured in dollars; therefore, the coming marriage was worthy of columns. The existence of Herbert Talcott became also of prime importance, not because he had ever done anything, but because he was to marry the heiress of the Blight fortune. How many a worthy Jones or a poor but noble Robinson has to descend to an advertisement to make his happiness known to the careless world? How many a lovely Joan goes to her wedding unread-of because her forebears were lacking, not in those qualities which open the gates of heaven, but in acquisitiveness?

To the public it could matter little that Rufus Blight was a simple, kindly soul who was as contented years ago when he stood behind his counter as to-day when he sought on the golf-links that sense of action which is necessary to a man's happiness. The vital fact was that the trust had paid him millions for his steel-works; not that Penelope was a simple, lovely woman like thousands of her sisters, but that her wedding-gifts would be worthy of the daughter of Maecenas. Accustomed though I had become in the routine of my work to just such a judgment of vital facts, now that the story told was my own last chapter I made a silent protest against the manner of the telling.

I thought of Rufus Blight as a quiet man, happiest not in the stately library, but in his den surrounded by a medley of homely things. Thinking of Penelope I turned to those vagrant dreams, now forbidden. In them Penelope and I were to go back to the valley, to ride again over the mountain road, to stand again as we had stood that day when she led me over the tangled trail into the sunlit clearing. Those were joys in which millions had no part. But as I read of the Blight millions, and of that blue-blooded Talcott line which traced back a hundred years to a member of the cabinet, it was hard for me to believe that I knew these exalted beings, that I had sat with Rufus Blight and talked of days in the valley, that Penelope and I had galloped over the country astride the same white mule, that I even had engaged with one so distinguished as Herbert Talcott in a brawl in a restaurant. Gilded by those who report the comings and goings of those whom one should know, as Mrs. Bannister might put it, they seemed aliens, manikins that moved in a stage world. As such I tried to think of them, for it was best, but I had as well set myself to efface my memory.

The last chapter of my own story was written by unknown hands. The epilogue remained, in which I was to go on seeking what contentment I could find in action. But my whole story was not written on these flimsy pages. It was before me always and always I was turning to it, always asking myself how it would have run had this not happened or had that occurred. Studying it over and over again in my room at night and on my long walks up-town, I found that I could not think of Penelope Blight as an alien creature for whose happiness I had no longer any care. What of her story which was in the writing? Did she know this Talcott whom she had chosen to fill its last pages? She knew him as I knew him first, as a quiet, gentlemanly man with pleasant manners. Was it not her right to know him as I knew him now, as a drunken brawler, who in his cups had betrayed the unworthy motive of his devotion? These questions troubled me for many days. I was not a prude. I knew that all men have their foibles, that many great men have over-indulged in liquor, that a man's whole character is not to be damned by a single slip. I knew that did all women see the men whom they choose for marriage as others see them we should have a plague of spinsters. But I feared for Penelope Blight. This was not because Talcott was worse than the mass of his fellows, but because the best of his fellows was none too good for her. But how could I go to her and declare that Talcott when drunk had avowed a purpose to marry her for her millions? It seemed the part of a tattler. The world would say that I acted from jealousy. Indeed, it was hard at times to convince myself that jealousy was not the basis of my fear for her. Yet I felt that I must save her from a disillusionment which might come too late. Were her father here that disillusionment would be speedy; but he was far away, and always his last words were with me, as he spoke them that night in the street: "You will take care of Penelope, won't you, boy?"

I had promised that. It was simply repeating my boyhood promise. And now I kept asking myself if I was not forgetting that trust when I kept silent because I feared in my pride to place myself in the light of an intermeddler, a bearer of scandalous tales; I would remember that morning when we had stood by the cabin door and I told her not to be afraid for I was guarding her. Was I guarding her?

For two weeks I kept puzzling over my course of action. I felt that the knowledge I held was hers by right, and hers, not mine, to judge of its triviality. Yet I could not bring myself to face her with it. Then came the time when I had to speak at once if I was to speak at all.

Mr. Hanks sent for me. As I stood before him, he studied me through his spectacles with his cold eyes, as he had studied me in those days when I was trying to persuade him to give me work, and I began counting my sins, wondering if in the cataclysm of ill luck which had overtaken me, I was to lose my position also.

After a moment he asked, as casually as he might have assigned me to an expedition to Harlem a few years before: "Malcolm, how soon can you leave for London?"

"At once," I said, and I spoke as casually as he, though my heart leaped at the mention of London, for here I sensed an opportunity beyond my wildest hopes.

"At once," he laughed and rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "I told the old man you would say that. He said that you were too young to fill Colt's shoes. Colt is ill, Malcolm; has to come home for a year's rest and I have backed you to do his work awhile. Of course, you won't do it as well as he, but you will do it fairly well, I think."

"I will do my best," said I, smiling.

"That is the way to talk," he returned. "I need hardly tell you to keep your head and work hard, and perhaps you will pull through till Colt gets back. He will be a little hurt when he sees his substitute. He has been there twenty years and feels himself quite a figure in the world, but as he has cabled for relief at once, he can't complain if we send him the one man who is always ready to go anywhere at once. Really, you have three days; you sail on Saturday."

I could have gone that day, had Hanks commanded it. The trust which he imposed in me was my reward for always having obeyed him without question, and in my state of mind that morning, between walking from his office to the steamer for years of absence and staying as I was, I should have chosen the former alternative. I wanted to get away. The only place where I could find even the shadow of contentment was at my desk. There imperative tasks filled a mind at other times occupied with unwholesome brooding. I seemed to move through waste places, with no object to catch the eye and thought and to drive away the consciousness of my unhappiness. Even my walk on Fifth Avenue had been abandoned lest at any moment Penelope might pass me with Talcott at her side; Miss Minion's had become a place of terror, for by ill chance Tom Marshall had been introduced to Talcott and he had developed a habit of dropping in on me and telling me what he had said to Bert Talcott and what Bert Talcott had said to him. He seemed to think that Talcott had conferred knighthood on him by knowing him. There were times, even, when I had gravely considered abandoning my chosen career and retiring to a bucolic life of loneliness in the valley. And at other times, into such depths of despondency was I plunged that I could seriously consider abandoning self entirely and devoting the remainder of my wrecked life to doing good, though just what trend my saintliness would take I never determined. In monkish days, I suppose, I should have gone into a cloister. But Hanks aroused me. Of course he did not know my thoughts. With his clear eyes he did not see that my life was a ruin. He regarded me rather as a fortunate man to whom opportunities were opening wonderfully well, and I accepted his view; though I was sure that I was taking a road which led to nowhere, yet travelling was better than sitting still. Looking at Hanks, I forgot that he had a wife and four accomplished daughters over in Jersey, and I said that I should take life as he took it, with a cynical interest in the game, with all thought on the run of the cards and little for personal winnings.

When I had cleared my desk for my successor and had bidden good-by to my old known tasks, I found myself turning to the new and unknown with more interest than I had believed myself capable of showing. So much was to be done in those three days that I had little time for self-condolence. One day had to be taken for a farewell to my parents; and what a day it was, with my father and mother driving down to Pleasantville in the late night to meet me that they might not lose one moment of my visit! Only when I slept were they from my side, for my mother's mind was filled with all the stories of shipwreck that she had ever read, and my father had doubts as to whether or not the moral environment of London was such as he would ask for his son. My father never had much faith in my moral strength. Then Mr. Pound came up to see me, having, as usual, commandeered Mr. Smiley's comfortable phaeton for the transport of himself and Mrs. Pound. His hair was white now, and he bent a little, and his voice had lost some of its pompous roll, but his phrases were as round as ever. He insisted that I owned the paper. He placed his hand on my head and for the information of Miss Agnes Spinner named my good points much as a jockey would those of a favorite horse. He congratulated himself on the success of his method of training and called on Judge Malcolm to admit that his effort to have his son go to Princeton had been based on a misconception of the underlying merits of the McGraw system of education.

The Pounds stayed to supper, much to my mother's suppressed indignation, for she had invited them, never thinking that under such unusual circumstances they would accept so promptly, so that by the time they drove away I had begun to feel that I must have made this hurried journey just to say good-by to my old mentor. In the hour, all too brief, that remained to me my mother broached the subject of my broken engagement, for in that she saw the reason of my melancholy, which I had been at pains to conceal. It could not be hidden from her quick eyes. She was convinced that Gladys Todd was not in her right mind; no woman in her right mind would deliberately refuse to marry such a man as her son. Was it a question of blood? Surely there was none better in the land than that which flowed in the veins of the McLaurins. Was it money? There was no finer farm in all the valley than the one which some day would be mine, with the bridge stock and the Kansas bonds. Was it character? Recalling the Sunday afternoons when she and I had worked together so patiently over the catechism and Bible lessons, she was sure that she had done her duty toward me and could never dream of my having failed in mine. So, to my mother's thinking, the loss was Gladys Todd's, a consoling view of my plight which she endeavored to make me take, and she sought to cheer me with a highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my quondam fiancÉe. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and as faithless as Gladys Todd.

Her arms were around my neck and she whispered in my ear, that even my father might not hear her: "Davy, take Penelope. We McLaurins always looked down on the Blights, but that makes no difference, Davy—take Penelope."