her never apparent.

Just as Aline could not forgive the rejected suitor for allowing
her to love him, so the girl he married never forgave Aline for
having loved her husband. Least of all could Sally Winthrop, who
two years after the summer at Bar Harbor married Herbert Nelson,
forgive her. And she let Herbert know it. Herbert was properly
in love with Sally Winthrop, but he liked to think that his
engagement to Aline, though brief and abruptly terminated, had
proved him to be a man fatally attractive to all women. And
though he was hypnotizing himself into believing that his feeling
for Aline had been the grand passion, the truth was that all that
kept her in his thoughts was his own vanity. He was not
discontented with his lot--his lot being Sally Winthrop, her
millions, and her estate of three hundred acres near Westbury.
Nor was he still longing for Aline. It was only that his vanity
was flattered by the recollection that one of the young women
most beloved by the public had once loved him.

"I once was a king in Babylon," he used to misquote to himself,
"and she was a Christian slave."

He was as young as that.

Had he been content in secret to assure himself that he once had
been a reigning monarch, his vanity would have harmed no one;
but, unfortunately, he possessed certain documentary evidence to
that fact. And he was sufficiently foolish not to wish to destroy
it. The evidence consisted of a dozen photographs he had snapped
of Aline during the happy days at Bar Harbor, and on which she