Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard. She did not want to keep him. In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiance. And the methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general--and Mr. Stevenson in particular--began to bore Miss Knowles, and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters. She considerately spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie himself. "Has a nasty suspicious mind," she reflected, "and a nasty jealous disposition. I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my friends when I marry him." Yet even Mr. Stevenson could have found no cause for jealousy in the matter of the letters. He might have objected to their being written at all, but beyond that they were innocuous. For all the personality they contained they might have been transcripts of Jimmie's reports to his firm. He clung doggedly to his prescribed topics, and he could not have devised a surer method of arousing the curiosity and the interest of this spoiled young person. She spent hours, which should have been devoted to the contemplation of approaching bliss, in reading between the prosaic lines, in searching for sentiment in a catalogue of railway stations, for tenderness in description of eccentric _tables d'hote_. Finding no trace of his old gallantry in all the closely written pages, she attributed its absence to obedience and accepted it as the higher tribute to her power. She was forced to judge her lover's longing by the quantity rather than by the ardor of his words, and to detect the yearning of a true lover's heart through such effectual disguise as: "Drewitt is a fine old chap; as placid and as bright as this country and a great deal more so than anyone you'll see in the windows of the Union League Club. He received me so cordially that I felt awkward about introducing the object of my visit, but when I had admired everything in sight from the mountains in the distance to the rug I was sitting on, I finally faced the situation and did it.