As the sunshine warmed him, and his horse forged along with a beautiful even stride beneath him, Vance worked up to a degree of enthusiasm he had not felt since he played on a winning football eleven in a college game. That very day he would seek her and ask her to be his wife. They would be married as soon as she was willing, and would go away in the yacht somewhere and learn to love each other. He would have an aim, a home, a stake in the community. At thirty years of age, he should be found no longer in dalliance with time to make it pass away. Vance, enamored of these visions, finished the circuit of the Park without seeing the central object of them, with whom he had resolved to make an appointment to receive him at home that afternoon. He rode back to the stable where he kept his horse, left it there, and, getting into an elevated car, went down-town to visit his lawyer, going with that gentleman afterwards into the stately halls of the Lawyers' Club for luncheon. At a table near him, Vance saw, sitting alone, a man named Crawford, whom he had met casually and knew for a hardworking and ambitious junior member of the New York bar. They exchanged nods, and Vance fancied that Crawford looked at him with a scrutiny more close than the occasion warranted. "You know Crawford, then?" said Mr. Gleason, an old friend of Vance's father. "He began work with our firm, but had an offer for a partnership in a year or two, and left us. He's a tremendous fellow to grind, but is beginning to reap the benefit of it in making a name for himself. If that fellow had a little capital, there is nothing he could not do, in this community. He has never been abroad, has had no pleasures of society, leads a scrupulously regular life, drinks no liquors or wines of any kind, and is in bed by twelve o'clock every night of his life. His only indulgence is to buy books, with which his lodgings overflow. We have always supposed him to be a woman-hater, until latterly, when straws seem to show that the wind blows for him from a point of sentiment. He was in the Adirondacks last summer, in camp with a friend, and I've an idea he met his fate then. After all, Vance, my dear boy, marriage is the goal man runs for, be he what he may. It will develop John Crawford, just as it would develop you, in the right direction; and I heartily wish you would tell me when you intend to succumb to the universal fate, and fall in love." "I heartily wish I could," said Vance, with a tinge of the mockery he had that morning put aside.