A cool breeze swept across the plain from the mountain rampart in the west, and the yellow leaves of the cottonwoods sifted down upon them in a golden shower. Over in the Clear Creek valley a freight train inched its way along toward Denver like a monstrous caterpillar. In the transparent atmosphere of the perfect autumn day Long’s Peak stood out as clearly as if its vast bulk rose from just behind the nearest swelling of the foot-hills. When the silence grew over-long, the play-boy spoke again. “Philip didn’t know--doesn’t know; but I have known all along. You love him, Jean. It is nothing to be ashamed of,” he hastened to add. “It is just something to be sorry for, now. I know well enough you can never give another man what you have given him ... but I want the right to stand by you--to comfort you. I’m asking you to marry me, Jean, dear.” The shock of a fear realized had gone out of her eyes when she turned to him, and in its place there was something almost like adoration. “You’d make sacrifices, too, wouldn’t you?” she said, very gently. Then: “Are you forgetting Miss Follansbee?” “Oh, no; Eugie is going to marry Stephen Drew. I meant to have told you. It is to be next month, I believe.” Another speechless moment while a second shower of the yellow leaves came circling down. Then she spoke again, still more gently. “I think you are one of God’s gentlemen, Harry; I shall always think so. But there are two good reasons why we can’t marry. One is----” “I know what you are going to say,” he interrupted: “that I don’t love you at all--in a marrying way; that I am only sorry for you. But let that go. Suppose there isn’t any marrying love on either side. You remember what you said the evening when I told you about Eugie; that people might marry and be a comfort to each other without that kind of love. Besides, when you come right down to it, what is marrying love, anyway?” She got up and shook the fallen leaves from her lap. “You have given one of the reasons, Harry; and some day, when you are not expecting it, I may hold a looking-glass before you and show you the other. You ask me what marrying love is: it is what I have seen, more than once, in your eyes ... and you were not looking at me. Let us get in and drive somewhere else. I don’t believe I shall ever want to come back to this place again.” As it chanced, it was at the precise moment when Bromley was putting his companion into the buggy preparatory to continuing the afternoon drive, that Philip was descending from a hired hack before a door that was seldom opened for callers in the daytime. It was Madam Blanche herself, a woman who still retained much of what had once been the beauty and charm of a riant, joyous girlhood, who admitted him. He stated his errand briefly. “I have come for Mona--the girl you call ‘Little Irish.’ Is she ready to go with me?” “Ready? Why, she’s gone!” “Gone?--gone where?”