"I should think, sir, that a stronger hint would be unnecessary." He bowed his head miserably. "Isn't there anything I can do, Lucy? I don't want to be sent off like this. I _do_ love you!" She considered. "Yes, there is," she said, after a moment. "You can write a romantic story and publish it in a magazine. Then, and not until then, will I forgive you." She turned coldly, and began to examine a photograph on the mantelpiece. After an apparently interminable period, receiving no reply, she turned sharply. "Well!" she demanded. Now, in the interval, Severne had been engaged in building a hasty but interesting mental pose. He had recalled to mind numerous historical and fictitious instances in which the man has been tempted by the woman to depart from his heaven-born principles. In some of these instances, when the woman had tempted successfully, the man had dwelt thenceforth in misery and died in torment, amid the execrations of mankind. In others, having resisted the siren, he had glowed with a high and exalted happiness, and finally had ascended to upper regions between applauding ranks of angels--which was not realism in the least. Art, said Severne to himself, is an enduring truth. Human passions are misleading. Self-sacrifice is noble. He resolved on the spot to become a martyr to his art. "I will never do it!" he answered, and stalked majestically from the room. Severne took his trouble henceforward in a becomingly serious-minded manner. For many years he was about to live shrouded in gloom--a gloom in whose twilight could be dimly discerned the shattered wreck of his life. After a long period, from the _debris_ of said wreck, he would build the structure of a great literary work of art, which all mankind would look upon with awe, but which he, standing apart, would eye with indifference, all joy being stricken dead by his memories of the past. But that was in the future. Just now he was in the gloom business. So, being a wealthy youth, he decided to go far, far away. This was necessary in order that he might bury his grief. He rather fancied battle-fields and carnage, but there were no wars. It would add to the picture if he could return bronzed and battle-scarred, but as that was impossible, he resolved to return bronzed, at any rate. So he bought a ticket to a small town in Wyoming. There he and his steamer-trunk boarded Thompson's stage, and journeyed to Placer Creek, where the two of them, he and the trunk, took up their quarters in a little board-ceiled room in the Prairie Dog Hotel.