ject. What can he give you-and what will you give him? I know Rochefoucauld well enough to understand that men's motives are never disinterested. Baron Lichtenfels offered, let me see, a decayed baronial hall on the Rhine if you would give me a dowry of fifty thousand dollars. Lord Granville would give me a better title, plenty of debts, if in exchange you would buy him a shooting-box; and little Trebetskoi, poor fellow, offered me an honest affection, a good, clear Russian title; but, after all, an American wife means so much investment of blood in the Stock Exchange of United States bonds. But Irving Chipman, what does he want?"

"He wants you, Dorothy. This man, for one, is a disinterested lover."

"He wants me! Not Elmholme, nor a place in the new administration?"

"How bold you are, Dorothy!"

"I may speak too plainly, papa. Judge Chipman is no friend of mine. I grant that his son is more of a gentleman."

"Can you not conceive that the man might love you? You are not always so modest, my dear. Women with half your beauty and cleverness are married every day in the year for love only."

"Not by men like Irving Chipman. There is one person whom he loves pre-eminently, and that one is himself; there is one god above all gods in his heart, and that ambition. It is not from modesty that I say he does not wish to marry me from disinterested affection. It is rather that I appreciate every iota of the advantage it would be to him. It is impossible to separate myself from my attributes. Yes, I am, to begin with, your daughter. To the tyro in politics, what more advantageous than to ally himself with a veteran? Then, on the other hand, I am in myself what you have made me-what my life has made me; the intrigues of political parties are familiar to me; the social diplomacy of political circles has been my meat and drink. I should never say the wrong thing to constituents. I should be true to my education. All this Irving Chipman knows. But he misses just this point: He thinks me ambitious. He thinks that what he can give me is what I desire: opportunity to rule the votes of men. He thinks that I would be content to be the slave of his personal ambition, the willing servant of his greatness. But I am tired of all this. I might at twenty have married Irving Chipman. I would not have understood him then. I would not have understood

myself. I did not know how little those things count for the things which we plan and scheme for. The complexity of the means is only a dazzling disguise for the insufficiency of the ends. I should like to live simply, to marry a man who takes life easily as it comes."

"Bosh, Dorothy! You have had too much country air, too much drifting in your boat, too much dawdling in the woods. Your energies are paralyzed from inaction, and so you think your desire for activity dead. You are too contented. Discontent is the gift of the gods. Come, go on to New York, or even change places with my telegraph operator. The fluctuations of the money market and the pulse of the people will set your blood stirring, and help you to realize that a quiet provincial life is well enough for women like Mrs. Allen, but you are made for other things. Come, I will drop Irving Chipman for the present, but only on condition that you give up this milk-maid strain."

"Well, papa, we can't agree, so we will compromise by saying nothing about it.”

CHAPTER VII.

AUTUMN LEAVES.

Ir was still October, but the Tarratine trees needed no calendar to tell that it was time for their leaves to fall, and Elmholme stood out grand and gray like a medieval castle, ungarnished by the petty adornment of foliage.

A small boat floated with the current down the Tarratine; in it, a man lay on his back, his hands clasped under his head, looking into the autumn sky, and the boat took its own course. From time to time the man raised his head on his elbow and looked up and down the river, to assure himself that he was in no danger of collision with small or large craft, and then resumed his attitude. Though massively built, his position and employment were more suggestive of a poet than an athlete. If neither poet nor athlete at rest, one would be justified in calling him a very lazy man. As a fact, Arthur Bradley was not a poet, nor was he more

lazy than any man may be who has nothing to do. Activity is entirely overestimated in its value to the world or its virtue in itself. It is often but restlessness, and the value of content and repose is something which our nervous American does not know. Bradley had nothing to do which could in any way benefit himself or his fellow-man, and he found it pleasant to float with the tide down the Tarratine. He was thinking, or rather recalling the autumn days of his boyhood at Lennox. The Berkshire hills are also beautiful in October, and he was familiar with the vanishing glory of the Berkshire trees. He was, however, not making any pictorial comparisons which were at all damaging to Tarratine. On the contrary, the foliage did not enter into his reflections at all. He was thinking of the picture which Miss Bender made, as she passed in a boat with five happy youngsters of the Allen clan. His memory then ran quickly back to a long, low, verandaed house in the Berkshires, where he had first seen Barbara Bender.

Then she was a little thing, not more than twelve years old, just transplanted from Italy. Her father had been a Bostonian-an artist of erratic fancies. Boston was too conservative for him, and he had gone to Italy. There he led a life into