Her heart! Steele laughed softly as he lifted the letter so that the
sweet perfume of it came to him more strongly. How she had tempted him
for a time! Almost--that night of the Hawkins' ball--he had surrendered
to her. He half-closed his eyes, and as the logs crackled in the
fireplace and the wind roared outside, he saw her again as he had seen
her that night--gloriously beautiful; memory of the witchery of her
voice, her hair, her eyes firing his blood like strong wine. And this
beauty might have been for him, was still his, if he chose. A word from
out of the wilderness, a few lines that he might write to-night--

With a sudden jerk Steele sat bolt upright. One after another he
crumpled the sheets of paper in his hand and tossed all but the
signature page into the fire. The last sheet he kept, studied it for a
little--as if her name were the answer to a problem--then laid it aside.
For a few moments there remained still the haunting sweetness of the
hyacinth. When it was gone, he gave a last searching sniff, rose to his
feet with a laugh in which there was some return of his old spirit, hid
that final page of her letter in his traveling kit and proceeded to
refill his pipe.

More than once Philip Steele had told himself that he was born a century
or two after his time. He had admitted this much to a few of his
friends, and they had laughed at him. One evening he had opened his
heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she
had called him eccentric. Within himself he knew that he was unlike
other men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten
generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood
rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were not
quite dead. At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed to