The next moment, two of the tennis-players, ending the diversions of the afternoon with a walk, approached the bridge: the man in his immaculate white flannels, his racket carried over his shoulder; the girl in her picturesque tennis toggery. Royce, dusty, besprinkled with sand, conscious of his coarse ill-made jeans clothes and his great cowhide boots, colored to the roots of his hair as their eyes fell upon him. In adaptation to the custom of the mountaineers, who never fail to speak to a stranger in passing, they both murmured a “Good-evening” as they went by. Royce, rousing with a galvanic start, lifted his hat, hardly realizing why they should glance at him in obvious surprise and with elevated eyebrows. For one moment he pondered fruitlessly on the significance of this trifling incident. The solution of the mystery came to him with a monition of added caution. The social training of the mountaineer does not comprise the ceremony of lifting the hat in salutation. If he would sustain the rural character he must needs have heed, since so slight a deflection was marked. He heard them laughing as they went, and he thought, with all the sensitiveness incident to a false position, that he was the cause of their mirth, the incongruity of this “million of manners” with such a subject. With an aversion to a repetition of this scene he betook himself out of the way of further excursionists, noticing that several couples were slowly strolling in the direction of the bridge. But as he moved forward from under the shadows of the fir and into the clear space of the lawn, he could scarcely sustain the observation which he felt leveled at him, Argus-eyed, from the verandas, the lawn, the tennis-court, the crags. His pride was in arms against his humble plight. His face burned with shame for his coarse garments, the dust, the very clumsiness of his rough boots, the length of his overgrown silky red-brown hair, his great awkward hat, the uncouth figure he cut in respectable society. But despite the flush on his cheek, and a thrill hot and tingling ever starting with each searing thought to his eyes, as if tears were to be shed but for the sheer shame of it, he laughed scornfully at his pride, and despised himself to be so poor, so forlorn, so outcast from his native world, yet so yearning for it. “What does it matter?” he said to himself. “They don’t know me. Lucien Royce is dead,--dead forever.” He walked on for a few minutes, the trained gait of an athlete, his graceful bearing, the individuality and distinction of his manner, all at their best, mechanically asserted as an unrealized protest in some sort that those lorgnettes on the verandas should not conceive too meanly of him. “I suppose I thought the ghost of a dude like Lucien Royce would be a mighty well-set-up affair, with a sort of spectral style about him and an unearthly chic. But what does it matter what they think of a nonentity of a stray mountaineer like this? Lucien