The Bachelors. William Dana Orcutt

in the best of humor when he dined with Huntington and the boy, and even accepted with good grace the unexpected announcement that Billy and Merry were to "take in" the dance at the "Hamilton." It may be that he was determined to demonstrate his strength of mind, for when the little party reassembled on the piazza, and the young people disappeared soon after the coffee, he devoted himself to Edith Stevens with an assiduity which caused Huntington to smile quietly to himself. Stevens and Thatcher, finding the ladies well provided for, went down-stairs for a game of billiards. Mrs. Thatcher cheerfully accepted Huntington's invitation to stroll to the pier, leaving Miss Stevens and Cosden by themselves.

      "I've made an appointment for you on Monday morning," Thatcher remarked to Cosden as he passed by.

      "Good! I'll keep it," was the prompt response.

      "What do you think of Marian's resurrection?" Edith asked him when they were alone.

      Cosden looked in the direction of the pier. "Do you mean—" he began.

      "Oh, no!" she interrupted him. "That is merely a revival, which I imagine may develop into an experience meeting. I mean Mr. Hamlen. Think of a devotion that forces a man to bury himself for twenty years! I could throw myself on his neck for restoring my lost belief in the constancy of man."

      "I hadn't heard that side of the story," Cosden observed.

      "It was while we were at school together," Edith explained. "Marian was irresistible then—as now, and every man she met lost his head altogether; but for a time she and Mr. Hamlen were engaged. Then she married the last man we expected; but she and Harry have been very happy. It simply shows that you never can tell."

      "Did you know Hamlen then?"

      "No; but I heard enough about him. If he had been merely intelligent instead of intellectual he might have had her just as well as not. He simply frightened her out of it."

      "Where did Monty come in?"

      "I never heard of him; things couldn't have gone very far."

      "You remember what he said just before we started out this morning? I know him pretty well and Monty doesn't speak like that unless there is something back of it."

      "Well," Edith laughed, "I'm sure I should have known, even so. Why, I could reel off so many names that you would think Marian was a heartless coquette; but it wasn't that at all. She simply loved attention, as all women do."

      "How about the daughter?" queried Cosden.

      "Merry?" Miss Stevens interrogated. "Oh, Merry is an up-to-date, twentieth-century thoroughbred. Marian has never known just what to make of her because she isn't like other girls, but to my mind the comparison is all to her credit. I'm generous when I give the child so good a character, for I know she heartily disapproves of me."

      Cosden was pleased with the intuition he had shown in his selection. "I should think young Huntington would bore her about as much as a youngster in kilts," he said, to draw her out.

      "He is her brother's friend, she adores athletics and dancing, and she is exercising the prerogative of her age and sex."

      There was a silence of several moments, during which time Cosden was debating with himself whether it was too late for him to bring his dancing of the vintage of the nineties up to the present confusion of innovations. He had scoffed at modern dances but it might become necessary to revise his views.

      "What an unusual ring you have," Miss Stevens exclaimed, leaning over his hand which rested upon the arm of his chair. "Is there a romance connected with it?"

      Cosden took it off and handed it to her. "No," he said. "When you know me better you will understand that romance doesn't come into my make-up. I bought that ring myself particularly to avoid any sentiment. I can take it off when I like, wear it or not as I choose, and if I lose it nobody's heart is broken."

      "That is an original idea," she laughed; then her face sobered. "I used to think romance was everything," she said seriously. "Now I wonder if what we call romance isn't another word for illusion. As I look back at my girl friends and see how many romances became tragedies, and how many matter-of-fact marriages, like Marian's and Harry's, have developed into real unions, I'm inclined to think that romance is a form of hypnotism."

      "You've expressed my idea to a dot," Cosden replied emphatically. "Huntington is a sentimentalist, and he stamps my common-sense ideas as evidences of a commercial instinct. I've seen just what you've seen, and I believe that the business of life rests on exactly the same basis as the business of trade."

      "Take Harry Thatcher, for example," Edith continued her own conversation rather than replied to his; "there's nothing brilliant about him outside his business success, but you always know where to find him. He's a comfortable man to have around. With men, they say he dominates everything he goes into, but in his home—well, every now and then he stands out just on principle, but as a matter of fact even his ideas are in his wife's name."

      Mrs. Thatcher and Huntington approached them returning from their moon-bath on the steps of the pier.

      "Did you ever see so wonderful a night, Edith?" she exclaimed with enthusiasm. "This atmosphere, and the renewing of my friendship with Mr. Huntington, make me feel like a girl again."

      "Monty must have been composing poetry," Cosden remarked.

      "No," Huntington disclaimed promptly; "poetry is the one contagious disease of youth which I have escaped. But Mrs. Thatcher has helped me to set back my clock of life more than twenty years, and that is an achievement of which I feel justly proud."

VII

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      Sunday morning found the party possessed of divers minds regarding the proper use to make of the wonderful sunshine and the mild yet bracing air, delicately scented with thousands of blooms on every side. Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher announced definitely that they proposed to hear the band concert at the Barracks, which gave a certain basis upon which to hang other plans. Billy Huntington suggested to Merry that they walk to Elba Beach, and Cosden, with the cordial disapproval of Edith Stevens and Billy, invited himself to accompany the young people on their walk. Huntington accounted for himself by reporting that Hamlen had telephoned, asking him to make the promised visit that morning, so the Stevenses joined forces with the Thatchers, and the plans were complete.

      Hamlen was visibly ill at ease when Huntington arrived. It was the only time during the twenty years of his residence there that any guest had been received at his villa by invitation of its owner. The new experience excited him, but the sincerity of Huntington's admiration of the grounds, and the friendliness of his attitude, made it impossible for any barrier long to exist between them. A touch of the old-time bitterness passed through Hamlen's mind, soon after Huntington's arrival, as he thought what it would have meant to him during any one of those four years at college to have had Monty Huntington come to his room in the same spirit of comradeship! Yet, he admitted to himself, the tragedies of that small world did lose some of their poignancy in retrospect, just as Huntington had said. He had been at a disadvantage in that the world into which he had been graduated was not the great world of which his classmate spoke, but rather another little one, smaller even than that which had tortured him—so small that he had remained still instead of growing, as the others had, into an estate from which he might look back with broader vision.

      This much at least had borne fruit from the conversation at the hotel, but beyond this there was an impression still deeper which increased Hamlen's spirit of unrest. From the time when he began to feel things strongly there had existed in him a sense of justice which completely dominated his other attributes. By the time he entered college this sense had assumed exaggerated proportions, and he had reached a point where he was looking for injustices, and was quick to resent them. He might have made a place for himself in athletics had he not expected some one else to take the initiative; he might have made friends except that he waited to be sought out. When he saw other fellows around him succeed