Arthur, ushered by the excruciatingly fashionable butler into the smallest of the series of reception _salons_, fell straightway into the most melancholy spirits. He felt the black, icy shadow of the beginnings of doubt as to his right to admittance on terms of equality, now that his titles to nobility had been torn from him and destroyed. He felt that he was in grave danger of being soon mingled in the minds of his fashionable friends and their servants with the vulgar herd, the respectable but "impossible" middle classes. Indeed, he was not sure that he didn't really belong among them. The sound of Janet's subdued, most elegant rustle, drove out of his mind everything but an awful dread of what she would say and think and feel when he had disclosed to her the hideous truth. She came sweeping in, her eyes full of unshed tears, her manner a model of refined grief, sympathetic, soothing. She was tall and slim, a perfect figure of the long, lithe type; her face was small and fine and dreamy; her hair of an unusual straw color, golden, yet pale, too, like the latest autumn leaves in the wan sun of November; her eyes were hazel, in strange and thrilling contrast to her hair. To behold her was to behold all that man finds most fascinating in woman, but so illumined by the soul within that to look on it with man's eye for charms feminine seemed somewhat like casting sensuous glances upon beauty enmarbled in a temple's fane. Janet was human, but the human that points the way to sexless heaven. "_Dear_ Artie!" she said gently. "_Dear_ Artie!" And she took both his hands and, as she looked at him, her tears fell. Arthur, in his new humility of poverty, felt honored indeed that any loss of his could cause her matchless soul thus to droop upon its dazzling outer walls the somber, showery insignia of grief. "But," she went on, "you have him still with you--his splendid, rugged character, the memory of all he did for you." Arthur was silent. They were seated now, side by side, and he was, somewhat timidly, holding one of her hands. "He was so simple and so honest--such a _man_!" she continued. "Does it hurt you, dear, for me to talk about him?" "No--no," he stammered, "I came to you--to--to--talk about him." Then, desperately, seizing her other hand and holding both tightly, "Janet, would it make any difference with you if I--if I--no--What am I saying? Janet, I release you from our engagement. I--I--have no prospects," he rushed on. "Father--They got round him and wheedled him into leaving everything to the college--to Tecumseh. I have nothing--I must give you up. I can't ask you to wait--and--" He could not go on. He longed for the throbbing, human touch that beauty of hers could make so thrilling. But she slowly drew away her hands. Her expression made him say: "What is it, Janet? What have I said that hurt you?" "Did you come," she asked, in a strange, distant voice, "because you thought your not having money would make a difference with me?"