the world. I can't help having the feeling that it would be a great and
humane thing—"

"Quite so," broke in the old man, "but let us talk of something else."

A month later Braden came to him and announced that he and Anne Tresslyn
were betrothed. They had known each other for years, and from the time
that Anne was seventeen Braden had loved her. He had been a quiet, rather
shy boy, and she a gay, self-possessed creature whose outlook upon life
was so far advanced beyond his, even in those days of adolescence, that he
looked upon her as the eighth wonder of the world. She had poise, manner,
worldly wisdom of a pleasantly superficial character that stood for
sophistication in his blissful estimate of her advantages over him, and
she was so adroit in the art of putting her finger upon the right spot at
precisely the right moment that he found himself wondering if he could
ever bring himself up to her insuperable level.

And when he came home after the two years in Europe, filled with great
thoughts and vast pretentions of a singularly unromantic nature, he found
her so much lovelier than before that where once he had shyly coveted he
now desired with a fervour that swept him headlong into a panic of dread
lest he had waited too long and that he had irretrievably lost her while
engaged in the wretchedly mundane and commonplace pursuit of trifles. He
was intensely amazed, therefore, to discover that she had loved him ever
since she was a child in short frocks. He expected her to believe him when
he said to her that she was the loveliest of all God's creatures, but it
was more than he could believe when she declared that he was as handsome
as a Greek god. That, of course, to him was a ludicrous thing to say, a
delusion, a fancy that could not be explained, and yet he had seen himself
in a mirror a dozen times a day, perhaps, without even suspecting, in his