We can not know. Perhaps Bilson was to blame. A man may be in love—over head and ears in love—and yet the little red feather of his vanity will stick out of the depths, and proclaim that his self–conceit is not yet dead. Perhaps it was Bilson: perhaps it was some other cause. It matters not. One dull November day, Sophronia Huckins told Samuel Bilson that she could not and would not marry him. “It was my intent, Samuel; but I ’ave seen it was not the thing for neither of us. If you had ’a’ seen your way clear five or ten or may befifteen years ago, I don’t say as it wouldn’t ’a’ been different. But as to sich a thing _now_, I may ’ave been foolish a–listenin’ to you last July; but what brains I ’ave is about me now, an’ I tell you plain, Samuel Bilson, it can’t never be.” To Bilson this came like a clap of thunder out of the clearest and sunniest of skies. If the Cupid within him had grown old and awkward, he was unaware of it. To his dull and heavily British apprehension, it was the same Cupid that he had known in earlier years. The defection of his betrothed was a blow from which he could not recover. “Them women,” he said, “is worse’n the measles. You don’t know when they’re comin’ out, an’ you don’t know when they’re goin’ in.” The blow fell upon him late one evening, long after dinner; when everything had been put to rights. He was sitting in the butler’s pantry, sipping his one glass of port, when Sophronia entered and delivered her dictum. She went out and left him—left him with the port. She left him with the sherry; she left him with the claret, with the old, old claret, with the comet year, with the wine that had rounded the Cape, with the Cognac, with the Chartreuse, with the syrupy Curaçoa and the Eau de Dantzic, and with the Scotch whiskey that Mr. Tullingworth–Gordon sometimes drank in despite of plain American Rye. [Illustration] She left him with the structure of a lifetime shattered; with the love of twenty years nipped in its late–bourgeoning bud. She left him alone, and she left him with a deadly nepenthe at hand. He fell upon those bottles, and, for once in his quiet, steady, conservative life, he drank his fill. He drank the soft, sub–acid claret; he drank the nutty sherry; he drank the yellow Chartreuse and the ruddy Curaçoa. He drank the fiery Cognac, and the smoky Scotch whiskey. He drank and drank, and as his grief rose higher and higher, high and more high he raised the intoxicating flood. At two o’clock of that night, a respectable butler opened a side–door in the mansion of Mr. Tullingworth–Gordon, and sallied forth to cool his brow in the midnight air.