The Bachelors. William Dana Orcutt

as he stepped out, "I presume it might be arranged.—Let Mason take you home. You've given me a lot to think over, Connie—"

      "This wouldn't break up our intimacy, you understand," Cosden asserted confidently. "No woman in the world shall ever do that; and it will be a good thing for you, too, to have a woman's influence come into your life."

      "Perhaps," Huntington assented dubiously; "but because you show symptoms of lapsing is no sign that I shall fall from the blessed state of bachelorhood. I supposed that our inoculation made us both immune, but if the virus has weakened in your system I have no doubt that any woman you select will have a heart big enough for us both."

      "If she hasn't, we won't take her into the firm," laughed Cosden.

II

       Table of Contents

      Huntington was unusually preoccupied during the period of dinner. Even when alone he was in the habit of making the evening meal a function, in which his man Dixon and his cook took especial pride. But to-night the words of praise or gentle criticism were lacking, one course succeeding another mechanically without comment of any kind. When Dixon followed him up-stairs to the library with coffee and liqueur he found him with his Transcript still unfolded lying in his lap; and, whatever may have happened in the mean time, the same attitude of abstraction prevailed when Dixon returned, three hours later, received his final instructions, and was dismissed for the night. Cosden had undoubtedly dropped off into that slumber which belongs by right to the man whose day has presented him with a brilliant inspiration; but Huntington still sat alone, absorbed in his own thoughts.

      The chronicler has already intimated that Huntington was possessed of a sentimental nature, but were he to stop there he would understate the real truth. Huntington was exceedingly sentimental—far more so than he himself realized, which made it natural that his friends should be deceived. He was a bachelor not from choice, as he would have the world think, but from circumstance, and the absence of home and wife and children represented the one lack in an otherwise entirely satisfactory career. It was the only thing his father had not provided for him, and he himself had not possessed sufficient energy to take the initiative.

      The conversation on the way home from the Club brought matters fairly before Huntington's mental vision. One moment it seemed monstrous that his friend of so many years' standing should deliberately announce his intention of entering into an estate from which he himself must perforce be barred, yet while the treachery seemed blackest Huntington found himself acknowledging that it was the proper step for Cosden to take, and admiring that characteristic which saved him from committing his own mistake. Yet, if years before he had only—but herein lies the most extraordinary evidence of Huntington's sentimentality. If the story were told—and it can scarcely be called a story—it would begin and end like Sidney Carton's in one long "what might have been."

      It was the mention of the name quite as much as the subject of their conversation which started in motion all that mysterious machinery which forces the present far out of its proper focus, disregards the future, and brings into the limelight those events of the past which the intervening years have magnified. No one can really explain it, and the wise make no attempt. "Marian Thatcher," Cosden had said. She was Marian Seymour when he had known her, twenty-odd years before, and the Marian he had known married a man named Thatcher right under the very noses of the legion of admirers, himself included, who fluttered about her. Of course it was only a coincidence, this combination of names, for the girl Cosden spoke of was only twenty; but just as substances combined by chemists in their laboratories begin to ferment and produce unwonted conditions, so did the combination of those two names start in Montgomery Huntington's brain that series of mental pictures which caused him to forget that the hour had come when sane persons of his age and disposition sought repose.

      This was not the first time that he had thus outraged Nature, and for the selfsame cause. Not a year of the more than twenty had passed without at least one mental pilgrimage to the shrine which had become more and more sacred as time piled itself on time. Satisfied that he alone was awake in the house, Huntington rose and drew a small table before his chair, and with a key taken from his pocket unlocked the drawer. It was a curious performance at that hour of night, and he seemed to be filled with guilty apprehensions, for he glanced from time to time at the closely-curtained door as if fearing interruption. The lock yielded readily and the contents of the drawer lay in front of him. Then, before seating himself again, he laid a fresh log on the open fire, turned off the lights, and resumed his favorite seat, with the table and the open drawer before him, illumined only by the flickering glare from the fireplace.

      For a moment he threw himself back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand as if the mental picture was even more delectable than the sight of the actual objects before him. Then he sat upright again, with a deep sigh, and transferred from the open drawer to the top of the table a most remarkable collection of articles, which seemed to belong to any one else rather than to him.

      There was a long white glove, which he reverently unfolded and placed at the further edge of the table-top; there was a bunch of faded flowers, the dried petals of which fell softly onto the white glove in spite of the delicacy of his handling; there was a yellowed envelope, from which he drew a brief note, read it word by word, shook his head sadly, replaced the note in its covering, and laid the envelope tenderly on the table beside its fellow-exhibits. A piece of pink ribbon followed the envelope, and then—fie! Monty Huntington! where did you get it?—then came a pink satin slipper; and the exhibition was complete.

      The showman seemed well satisfied with what he saw before him, for he reached across to his smoking-table and found as if by instinct a well-burnt brier pipe, with stem of albatross wing, which he filled with his own mixture of Arcady and puffed contentedly, his eyes fixed upon the exhibits. Then the dim, flickering light and the incense of the tobacco accomplished their transmogrification. No longer was he William Montgomery Huntington, lawyer, man of affairs, director, trustee and—bachelor; he was Monty Huntington, senior in Harvard College, back in his rooms in Beck after his Senior Dance, stricken by the darts of that roguish Cupid who shot his shafts from the soft tulle folds of the gown worn that night by this same Marian, the casual mention of whose name even now caused him to forget his age and position and the dignity demanded in a bachelor of forty-five.

      The cloud of fragrant smoke concealed the fact that the long white glove was empty now; the flickering light made golden the words of the brief note which thanked him for the evening which his escort had made so wonderful a memory in a young girl's heart; the faded flowers were things of color and fragrance, more sweetly redolent because they had risen and fallen with her breath of life; the pink ribbon seemed to have a dance-card at one end and to be tied to a graceful wrist at the other; and the slipper—yes, the slipper—the dreamer smiled as he recalled the fleeting figure which flew up the brownstone steps behind her chaperon when he had last seen her, in playful fearfulness because he had managed to whisper in her ear that she was the sweetest, dearest, most bewitching maiden he had ever seen. The slipper had dropped off, and remained in his possession by right of capture since the owner would not come outside the door to claim her own.

      He had intended to make this selfsame slipper the excuse for following up what he was convinced was the romance of his life; but Marian Seymour had already returned home to New York when he called three days later. This was a disappointment, still at that moment it seemed but a postponement after all, for he was sailing for Europe a fortnight hence and could easily reach New York a day or two earlier than he had planned. Thus far the idea was capital; but when the second call was paid, with the pink slipper safely reposing in his pocket, he found that the dainty foot to which the slipper belonged had stepped upon an ocean steamer which sailed the day before.

      Even this second misadventure failed to dampen his ardor. Good fortune had arranged for him to follow in her direction, and surely, when once upon the same continent, the slipper would be a lodestone of sufficient potency to draw together two souls such as theirs. Yet he returned six months later without having had the expected happen, and soon after landing he learned of her engagement to a Mr. Thatcher.

      There