When we got down to the less frequented end of the Board Walk the moment seemed to have arrived. The crowd had thinned out to occasional groups of stragglers or lovers going two and two. Only here and there one came on a shop; only here and there on a hotel. One got an opportunity to see the stars, and to hear the ocean as something more than a drumbeat to the blare. By a simultaneous movement we paused by the rail, to look down on the dim, white, moving line of breakers. It was one of those instants when between two people drawn closely to each other something leaps. Had there been nothing imperative to keep us apart I should have seized her in my arms; she would have nestled there. I had distinctly the knowledge that she would have responded to anything—and that the initiative was mine. As a rocket that bursts into cascades of fire suddenly goes out, so suddenly the moment passed, leaving us with a sense of coldness, primarily due to me. Somewhat desperately I began: “Do you know what has made the difficulties between me and my family?” She was gazing off toward the dark horizon. “Vaguely.” “Do you know that for years I gave them a great deal of trouble?” “Vaguely.” “Do you know that—” “Do you know,” she interrupted, quietly, “that I used to have a brother?” The question so took me by surprise that I answered, blankly, “No.” “Yes, I had. He was nearly ten years older than I, which would make him about your age. He was—he was wild.” “And is he—is he dead?” “He shot himself—about five years ago. It was a terrible story, and I don’t want to tell it to you. I only want to say that my mother feels that if—if father hadn’t been so hard on him—if he’d played him along gently—he might easily have been saved. It’s what Mr. Christian—he’s had great experience in that sort of thing—he does a wonderful work among men that have gone under—but it’s what he used to tell father; only father hadn’t nearly so much patience with his own son as he would have had with some one else’s, and so— I wonder if you can understand that when mother heard that you had been—had been—well, a little like my brother—” “Who told her?” “Oh, I don’t know. These things get about. It might have been Annette.” “And assuming that I was what you call wild, have you any idea how wild I was?” Her response to this was to say: “I like a man to have spirit. The men who always keep on the safe side—” She left this sentiment there, to add, less irrelevantly than it sounded: “Mother wants you to come and dine with us to-morrow evening. It will be Christmas Day, but we sha’n’t keep it as Christmas. We don’t have any Christmases since—since Tony died. We simply—we simply sha’n’t be alone.”