rising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out, leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat in the hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to her lips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by the tenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she was mine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keener comprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not of jealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curious eccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush of ambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in the things in which success was possible. If I could not give what George gave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better. When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, I had little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they had always done to the possession of power. Only let that power find its fullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as the living present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all, what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life, while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibre woven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust. Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way to triumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to the dazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound up with my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feeling from which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities of my position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passed through my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and kept me tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. For pleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or an absent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to think or to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar after dinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bare shoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in New York, and during my absence, it never occurred to me to enquire how she filled her long, empty days. She was sure of me, she trusted me, I knew; and in the future, I told myself when I had leisure to think of it--next year, perhaps--I should begin again to play the part of an ardent lover. She was as desirable--she was far dearer to me than she had ever been in her life, but while I held her safe and close in my clasp, my mind reached out with its indomitable energy after the uncertain, the unattained. I had my wife--what I wanted now was a fortune and a great name to lay at her feet.