The world is probably right; and, to those of us who are healthily adapted to our environment, the world is enough. Blessed are they who are fitted, for they shall survive. The world is enough; but the poet sang, love is enough. Shall we say, love is surplusage? The world is always right; and how virtuously the healthy world reproves what is morbid! How all the world unites in condemning him who is not fully content with itself! For such an one it cannot even spare its pity. There is a kind of personal animus in its contempt. Let us hasten to join our little voices to swell the universal song. So John told the story--plainly and coldly, the more adversely for the lingering doubt; so we tell the story, and the doubt lessens as we state the facts, and quite vanishes as we reach the end. It is the story of a common crime, and the criminal is no friend of ours, as he was of John's. Moreover, Schuyler called the criminal a fool. I. IN April, 1873, Henry Vane was sitting on the _perron_ of a small summer house in Brittany, poking the pebbles in the driveway with his cane. He had been there for half an hour, and there was nothing in his appearance and attitude to indicate that he would not be there for half an hour more. There was one red pebble, in particular, which he had an especial desire to prod out from among the others, which were gray. But it was round and slippery, and slid about the ferruled end of his cane. After poking it some time, he desisted and held the cane in his hands in front of his knees, which, as the next step of the porch was not much lower, were as high as his chin. "C'en est fait de moi," he muttered. Henry Vane, though a New Yorker, had been brought up in France, and in the French language his thoughts came most readily. He had just seen, for the last time, an old friend of his--a girl, whom he had known in infancy, in childhood, in maidenhood; and whom it seemed incredible, impossible, intolerable, that he should know no more. It was upon the piazza of her uncle's house that he was sitting; and she was to leave the next day for Switzerland. He was of age that day, and was "his own man now." "And hers," he thought, bitterly. She did not love him, however; and, at his request, had just told him so. "Décidément, c'en est fait de moi," he muttered again, and gave the pebble a vicious dig, which sent it flying into an acacia bush that stood in a green tub by the side of the driveway. He was twenty-one that day, and had come into his fortune. His fortune was not much--four thousand a year, left him by his grandmother and invested in government bonds. Still, twenty thousand francs made him distinctly a _rentier_; and twenty thousand francs seemed a good deal, shared with the girl he loved. But it seemed very little for him alone; genteel poverty in fact. He certainly could neither yacht nor race. Travelling--except _en étudiant_--was equally out of the question.