“In the present instance I’ve promised for you, and I guess you’ll have to go,” said Carfax quietly. “And as for my sitting up with you afterward, that’s a part of the game. I’m immensely interested in skulls and things.” And thus, without further argument, it was decided. XIII The Burnt Child The dinner in the president’s dining-room at Highmount College was anything but formal. By this time the two young men from the North were on a footing which lacked little of the household relation, Mrs. Caswell having said hospitably, more than once, that their plates were always laid at the faculty table. Quite naturally, the Ocoee experiment came in for a share of the table-talk, and in this field Tregarvon let Carfax do most of the ploughing. For one reason, Miss Richardia had changed her place and was sitting on the other side of the golden one; and for another, his own companion was the French teacher, who persisted in talking, and making him talk, of things trans-atlantic and Parisian. Later, however, he was tempted--and fell. The night was too cool for the veranda, and the after-dinner dispersal was to the music-room. Richardia played, and for a time Tregarvon sat beside Miss Farron and said “Yes” and “No,” as the occasion demanded, coming always afterward to a rapt and regretful contemplation of the pearl of great price on the piano-bench. Being an artist to her finger-tips, Miss Birrell at the piano became a breaker of hearts by just so much more as the mask of self-consciousness fell away, leaving the true art soul free to express itself in the musician’s ecstasy of detachment. In such moments Tregarvon saw her as the embodied spirit of all that was most desirable in the world of women; gazed spellbound, sinned, repented, and sinned again; calling himself hard names in one breath, and rhapsodizing deliriously over the supernal charm of her in the next. Again and again he told himself in caustic self-derision that his infatuation was merely the result of propinquity--the nearness of Richardia coupled with the remoteness of Elizabeth. But as often as he pleaded this excuse, the merciless inner and final court of appeals assured him that the evasion was but the adding of self-deception to unfaithfulness, and insisted upon a restatement of the humiliating facts: that he had promised to marry a woman whom he did not love, when he knew he did not love her; and that he was now adding to this baseness by admitting his love for another.