It was a superb morning, half summer, half spring. In the distance a forest stretched indefinitely and lost itself in the haze of the horizon beyond. The sky was tenderly blue, and, beneath, a lawn green as the baize on a roulette-table was circled by a bright-red road. He had breakfasted infamously on food that might have been cooked by a butcher to whom breakfast is an odious thing. Yet its iniquity he accepted as a matter of course. He knew, as we all do, that for bad food, bad service, and for futility of complaint our country hotels are unrivalled, even in Spain. He was there not to enjoy himself, still less for the pleasures a blue ribbon can cause: he was there to fan into flame the interest which Miss Dunellen had exhibited; and as he strolled down the verandah, a crop under his arm, his trousers strapped, he had no intention of quarrelling with the fare. Quite a number of people were basking in the sunlight, and, as he passed, some of them turned and looked; for at Aiken men that have more than one lung are in demand, and, when Roland registered his historic name, to the unattached females a little flutter of anticipation came. But Roland was not in search of flirtations: he moved by one group into another until he reached a corner of the verandah in which Mrs. Metuchen and Miss Dunellen sat. Merely by the expression on the faces of those whom he greeted it was patent to the others that the trio were on familiar terms; and when presently he accompanied Miss Dunellen off the verandah, aided her to mount a horse that waited there, mounted another himself, and cantered off with the girl, the unattached females declared that the twain must be engaged. In that they were in error. As yet Roland had not said a word to the charge he might not have said to the matron. Both of these ladies had been surprised when he reached Aiken, and both had been pleased as well. In that surprise, in that pleasure, Roland had actively collaborated; and taking on himself to answer before it was framed the question which his advent naturally prompted, he stated that in journeying from Savannah to Asheville he had stopped over at Aiken as at a halfway house, and that, too, without an idea of encountering anyone whom he knew. Thereafter for several days he managed to make himself indispensable to the matron, companionable to her charge; but now, on this particular morning, as he rattled down the red road, the courage which had deserted him returned; and a few hours later, when before a mirror in his bedroom he stood arranging his cravat, he caught a reflection of Hyperion, son-in-law of Croesus. V.