For Miss Billington occupied a peculiar position. She was the Diana of a small but highly prosperous city in the South-West; a city which her father had built up in years of enterprising toil. To mention the town of Los Brazos to any capitalist in the land was to call up the name of Billington, the brilliant speculator who, ruined on the Boston stock-market, went to Texas and absolutely created a town which for wealth, beauty and social distinction had not its equal in the great South-West. It was colonized with college graduates from New York, Boston and Philadelphia; and, in Los Brazos, boys who had left cane-rushes and campus choruses scarce ten years behind them had fortunes in the hundred thousands, and stood high in public places. As the daughter of the founder of Los Brazos, Miss Billington’s fortunes were allied, she could not but feel, to the place of her birth. There must she marry, there must she continue the social leadership which her mother was only too ready to lay down. The Mayor of the town, the District Attorney, the Supreme Court Judge and the Bishop were all among her many suitors; and six months before she had wished, being a natural-born sport, if she _was_ a girl, that they would only get together and shake dice to see which of them should have her. But then she hadn’t come East and met Jack Hatterly. She thought of the first day she had seen the Atlantic Ocean and Jack, and she wished now that she had never been seized with the fancy to gaze on the great water. And yet, what a glorious day that was! How grand [Illustration] she had thought the ocean! And how grand she had thought Jack! And now she had given him up forever, that model of manly beauty and audacity; Jack with his jokes and his deviltries and his exhaustless capacity for ever new and original larks. Was it absolutely needful? Her poor little soul had to answer itself that it was. To leave Los Brazos and the great house with the cool quiet court-yard and the broad verandahs, and to live in crowded, noisy New York, where she knew not a soul except Jack--to be separated from those two good fairies who lived only to gratify her slightest wish--to “go back” on Los Brazos, the pride of the Billingtons--no; it was impossible, impossible! She must stick to her post and make her choice between the Mayor and the Judge and the District Attorney and the Bishop. But how dull and serious and business-like they all seemed to her now that she had known Jack Hatterly, the first man she had ever met with a well-developed sense of humor!