“How can a man be so infernally indifferent to so much youth, beauty and innocence?” repeated Jerry Gaines, enthusiastically. “Upon my word, I marvel that you are not jubilant over the prospect fate holds out to you--you are ungrateful, old boy!” Neither one of his comrades saw the look of pain that gathered for an instant in John Dinsmore’s eyes, nor did they see the mobile lips under the heavy mustache quiver for an instant, then draw themselves firmly into a terse straight line. How could he, whose whole heart’s affection had been wasted on the fairest of womankind, look with anything save distrust, nor to say, hatred, on the whole sex, he told himself with a bitter sigh, which he carefully repressed ere it fell from his white lips. “Love and marriage are not for me, boys--you both know that,” he retorted, addressing his words to both his companions. “I shall never love, consequently, never marry,” he said, slowly and earnestly. “Every fellow says that until he meets the right girl,” declared the artist, his eyes still fastened upon that lovely pictured face laughing up at him. “Every one save reporters,” laughed Gaines, “and their failure to wed is because no sweet girl in her senses would agree to have one of them if she stops to consider the question of bread and butter,” he declared, breaking into a rollicking tune of “How Lonely the Life of a Bachelor Is.” “I beg pardon for this digression, old fellow,” he cried, catching up the letter. “Now for letting you know what Mademoiselle Jess has to say to you--in haste--as the lower left hand of the envelope is marked, and underlined with a grand flourish.” The quaint letter, so characteristic of the girl who had written it, ran as follows: “To MR. JOHN DINSMORE, New York City: “DEAR MR. DINSMORE: No one knows that I am writing to you, or I should never in the world be allowed to send it. I suppose you are wondering who I am. Well, I am Jess--just Jess. “I was up in the big apple tree in the orchard when the lawyer from the city came out here, and he not knowing I was up there, sat down on the bench beneath it and told Mrs. Bryson, the housekeeper, of the wonderful will which he said had just been forwarded to him to attend to, by somebody, I forget who; and in it--the will I mean--I was to be a great heiress--the greatest in all Louisiana--if you would marry me, and if you wouldn’t, the plantation and all the estate were to be sold, and the money sent to the heathen Chinese, and I was to go out into the world a beggar, as well as yourself, or be a governess, or nursery maid, or kitchen maid maybe. “I don’t know whether it would be nice or not to marry anybody, but I’d rather a million times do that than leave the old plantation, where I know every tree and leaf, and even the wild birds that come and go each season.