“My dear Gordon, you are better than your theories. Your passionate heart contradicts your frigid intellect. I repeat it--you are in love.” “Please don’t repeat it again,” said Wright. Bernard took his arm, and they walked along. “What shall I call it, then? You are engaged in making studies for matrimony.” “I don’t in the least object to your calling it that. My studies are of extreme interest.” “And one of those young ladies is the fair volume that contains the precious lesson,” said Longueville. “Or perhaps your text-book is in two volumes?” “No; there is one of them I am not studying at all. I never could do two things at once.” “That proves you are in love. One can’t be in love with two women at once, but one may perfectly have two of them--or as many as you please--up for a competitive examination. However, as I asked you before, which of these young ladies is it that you have selected?” Gordon Wright stopped abruptly, eying his friend. “Which should you say?” “Ah, that ‘s not a fair question,” Bernard urged. “It would be invidious for me to name one rather than the other, and if I were to mention the wrong one, I should feel as if I had been guilty of a rudeness towards the other. Don’t you see?” Gordon saw, perhaps, but he held to his idea of making his companion commit himself. “Never mind the rudeness. I will do the same by you some day, to make it up. Which of them should you think me likely to have taken a fancy to? On general grounds, now, from what you know of me?” He proposed this problem with an animated eye. “You forget,” his friend said, “that though I know, thank heaven, a good deal of you, I know very little of either of those girls. I have had too little evidence.” “Yes, but you are a man who notices. That ‘s why I wanted you to come.” “I spoke only to Miss Evers.”