“I have given you the impression of being a hard man. It is a truthful impression; I am a hard man. I should not be where I am to-day, had I not been hard, very hard. But if I have spoken to you with bitterness, you will remember, please, that I feel no bitterness toward you. I like you, on the contrary. But in my life there is no place for individual likes or dislikes. Long ago, I decided to play a great game for great stakes. I have won at that game; I shall continue to win. Nothing else counts with me; nothing! That is all. Good-by, Barrison!” “Good-by, sir,” the younger man said, and went out of the big, rich, inner office, where even the noise and bustle of the world came softly, lest anything disturb the imperious brain brooding and planning at the desk. It was in a very sober mood that Barrison reached Miss Templeton’s hotel at luncheon time, and sent up his card. CHAPTER XVIII MISS TEMPLETON AT HOME “I thought you’d just as lief have lunch up here,” said Miss Templeton. Barrison looked at her as though he had never seen her before. Indeed, he was not sure that he ever had. It is an experience not unknown to most of us, that of finding ourselves confronting some one or something long familiar, as we thought, but presented all at once in a new guise. From the first, Jim had felt in Miss Templeton a personality deeper and truer than would be superficially descried through her paint and powder and conspicuous dresses. But, so far, his idea of her had had to be more or less theoretical and instinctive; he had not had very much to go by. To-day, and for the first time, he saw in the flesh the woman whom he had half unconsciously idealized in the spirit: a very sweet, rather shy woman, whose starry eyes and clear skin looked the more strikingly lovely for being, to-day, unassisted by artifice. She wore a nunlike gray frock, and her splendid gold hair was simply arranged. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that which she presented with the Woman in Purple of but a brief fortnight ago. Her parlor was a further surprise. Unconsciously, he found himself remembering Kitty Legaye’s dainty and bizarre apartment, and comparing the two. Who would have dreamed that it was in such surroundings as these that this woman would choose to live? She had not, like Kitty, transformed her apartment with stuffs and ornamentations. Her individuality had somehow transfused itself through everything, superior to trappings or furnishings. She had left the room very much as it must have been when she took it. The curtains and the carpets were the same that the hotel manager had put there; but they seemed somehow of secondary importance. On that drab regulation background she had contrived to paint herself and what she lived for in colors that were, while subdued, unmistakable. No one could enter there without knowing that he was in the sanctum of a personality.