"Fact; struck a 'lime horse' two weeks ago, and they've been keeping it dark and unloading the stock right and left. You are not in it, I hope?" Bartrow was not, but he knew that Elliott was; knew, too, that in any unloading _sauve qui peut_ the old pioneer would most likely be one of those found dead in the deserted trenches. Wherefore he slurred his supper and hastened out to the house in Colfax Avenue, not to ask help, as he had prefigured, but to ascertain if there were not some way in which a broken man might tender it. There was a light in the library and none in the parlor; and Bartrow, being rather more a brevet member of Stephen Elliott's family than a visitor, nodded to the servant who admitted him, hung up his coat and hat, and walked unannounced into the lighted room. When he discovered that the library held but one occupant, that the shapely head bending over a book in the cone of light beneath the reading-lamp was not Connie's, he realized the magnitude of Connie's duplicity, and equanimity forsook him. Miss Van Vetter shut her finger in her book and smiled as if his sudden appearance were quite a matter of course. "I hoped you would come," she said. "Have you been to dinner?" The prosaic question might have enabled a less ingenuous man to cover his discomposure with some poor verbal mantle of commonplace or what not; but Bartrow could only murmur "Good Lord!" sinking therewith into the hollow of the nearest chair because his emotion was too great to be borne standing. Since she was not a party to Connie's small plot, Myra was left to infer that her visitor was ill, and she rose in sympathetic concern. "Why, Mr. Bartrow! is anything the matter? Shall I get you something? a glass of wine, or"-- Bartrow shook his head and besought her with both hands to sit down again. "No, nothing, thank you; it's miles past that sort of mending. Do you--do you happen to know where your cousin is?" "Why, yes; she has gone to Boulder with Uncle Stephen." "I--I thought you were going," Bartrow stammered. It did not occur to Miss Van Vetter to wonder why he should have thought anything about it. "I thought so myself, up to the last moment," she rejoined. Bartrow leaned forward with his hands on his knees. "Miss Myra, would you--do you mind telling me why you didn't go?" He said it with reproachful gravity. Miss Van Vetter's poise was an inheritance which had lost nothing in transmission, but the unconscious reproach in his appeal overset it. Under less trying conditions her laugh would have emancipated him; but being still in the bonds of unreadiness, he could only glower at her in a way which lacked nothing of hostility save intention, and say, "I should think you might tell me what you're laughing at!" "Oh, nothing--nothing at all. Only one would think you were sorry I didn't go. Are you?"