Now Isabel had told him but one thing of any considerable importance to a lover, and Antrim’s thought naturally reverted to that thing. “Oh, yes,” he rejoined, trying to speak lightly. “She gave me my quittance for good and all a while back, but--” He was going on to add that it is a long lane that has no turning, when Dorothy interrupted: “I knew she would tell you first! And now this dreadful thing has come between them. Harry, I believe it will kill her if she has to give him up now. She is acting so strangely that I fairly tremble for her reason.” Antrim throttled a wild impulse to give place to madness and forced himself to say, as calmly as might be, “Then she has told you that--that she loves Brant?” Dorothy decided on the spur of the moment that it was no time for half confidences. “Yes; and that isn’t the worst of it. She sent him away because--because she didn’t know her own heart, I suppose. I told her he would come back; and now he never can. Isn’t it too pitiful!” Antrim thought it was--in more senses than one. More than that, it was blankly incredible, or rather it would be apart from Dorothy’s positive assertion. Could he have been so purblind as not to have seen what was going on before his very eyes? Reason said No; but a misconception, once endowed with the breath of life, is sure to find plenty to fatten upon, and the atoms of corroborative evidence began to assemble quickly with Dorothy’s declaration for a nucleus. This was why Brant had been so sure that he knew Isabel’s preference; and he had been mistaken, after all. This was why he had stopped going to Hollywood, and why he had been so quick to deny even the hint of a love affair with Dorothy. And Isabel: had she not steadfastly refused to say in so many words that she did not love any one else? Antrim called himself hard names under his breath, and in the first flush of the new misery would have been glad to be able to charge his friend with insincerity. He saw the injustice of that in time to fight it down, and then rancour gave place to honest admiration. How unselfishly Brant had effaced himself, and how quick he had been to succour and to offer comfort and countenance to his rival! That, too, seemed incredible, even to Brant’s best friend; but since incredible things were the order of the day, it was decently in keeping with all the other happenings of a time which was hopelessly out of joint. So Antrim assured himself, with what resignation he could command; but for all that, this latest buffet of the boxer Misfortune was as a bolt from the blue, and he staggered under it, though not toward the abyss, since he had lately had his lesson and had profited by it.