“No; only one of us--more’s the pity. I’m a worse rotter than your man Middleton. Of course I like Eugie--like her immensely; we grew up together. The trouble is she likes me; not wisely, but a lot too well. She has always taken the pinafore arrangement as a settled thing. I am afraid she still takes it that way.” “Well, there isn’t any other ‘one and only’ in the case, is there?” “Not so you could observe it. But that isn’t the question. I haven’t any conscience--not in your meaning of the word--but I have something that partly answers the same purpose. I don’t want to be cajoled into marrying a woman that I don’t love in a marrying way. It would be a sorry bargain for the woman.” “I see. But this is all back-number stuff. Where does your jolt come in?” “At the front door, and as large as life. The younger sister’s health isn’t good; weak lungs. Thurlow--he’s the chap I met at Mrs. Demming’s--tells me that the whole Follansbee clan is about to come to Colorado to try the effect of the altitudes on Lucy Ann. Philip, old boy, I’m a ruined community!” Philip smiled again, less grimly, this time. The play-boy was presenting another facet of his many-sided character, an entirely new and different one. “Afraid the charming Eugenia will marry you out of hand?” he jested. “You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head! If she could find me as you found me last spring--a shameless down-and-out--there might be some hope for me. But now ... it’s a fearful price to have to pay for bracing up, Philip!” “What are you going to do about it--dodge?” “I can’t dodge. Thurlow will meet the Follansbees when they arrive, and the first thing he will tell them--oh, pot! don’t you see that I’m in for it up to my neck?” Philip tossed his cold pipe aside and got out of his chair. “Better go to bed and sleep on it,” he counselled. “Perhaps it won’t seem so much like an unmixed misfortune in the morning.” And as he reached his bed-room door: “This Miss Follansbee--is she good-looking, Harry?” “A glorious blonde, handsome enough to make your hair curl.” “Humph!” said Philip; “it strikes me you might be a lot worse off than you are. You might have epilepsy, or rheumatism, or small-pox, or something of that sort. Good-night.” And he went off to bed. XV EXUBERANT Denverites of the early ’eighties--not the bull-team pioneers of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant majority of tenderfoot later comers--lived strenuously in a boosters’ Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious “wide-openness.”