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Coleman with pleasure. They took chairs that formed a triangle and one side of it vibrated with talk. Coke and Marjory engaged in a tumultuous conversation concerning the prospective trip to Greece. The Sunday editor, as remote as if the apex of his angle was the top of a hill, could only study the girl’s clear profile. The youthful voices of the two others ran like bells. He did not scowl at Coke; he merely looked at him as if he gently disdained his mental calibre. In fact all the talk seemed to tire him; it was childish; as for him, he apparently found this babble almost insupportable.
    “And, just think of the camel rides we’ll have,” cried Coke.
    “Camel rides,” repeated Coleman, dejectedly. “My dear Coke.”
    Finally he arose like an old man climbing from a sick bed. “Well, I am afraid I must go, Miss Wainwright.” Then he said affectionately to Coke: “Good-bye, old boy. I hope you will have a good time.”
    Marjory walked with him to the door. He shook her hand in a friendly fashion. “Good-bye, Marjory,’ he said. “Perhaps it may happen that I shan’t see you again before you start for Greece and so I had best bid you God-speed — or whatever the term is — now. You will have a charming time; Greece must be a delightful place. Really, I envy you, Marjory. And now my dear child” — his voice grew brotherly, filled with the patronage of generous fraternal love,—” although I may never see you again let me wish you fifty as happy years as this last one has been for me.” He smiled frankly into her eyes; then dropping her hand, he went away.
    Coke renewed his tempest of talk as Marjory turned toward him. But after a series of splendid eruptions, whose red fire illumined all of ancient and modern Greece, he too went away.
    The professor was in his library apparently absorbed in a book when a tottering pale-faced woman appeared to him and, in her course toward a couch in a corner of the room, described almost a semi-circle. She flung herself face downward. A thick strand of hair swept over her shoulder. “Oh, my heart is broken! My heart is broken!”
    The professor arose, grizzled and thrice-old with pain. He went to the couch, but he found himself a handless, fetless man. “My poor child,” he said. “My poor child.” He remained listening stupidly to her convulsive sobbing. A ghastly kind of solemnity came upon the room.
    Suddenly the girl lifted herself and swept the strand of hair away from her face. She looked at the professor with the wide-open dilated eyes of one who still sleeps. “Father,” she said in a hollow voice, “he don’t love me. He don’t love me. He don’t love me at all. You were right, father.” She began to laugh.
    “Marjory,” said the professor, trembling. “Be quiet, child. Be quiet.”
    “But,” she said, “I thought he loved me — I was sure of it. But it don’t — don’t matter. I — I can’t get over it. Women — women, the — but it don’t matter.”
    “Marjory,” said the professor. “Marjory, my poor daughter.”
    She did not heed his appeal, but continued in a dull whisper. “He was playing with me. He was — was — was flirting with me. He didn’t care when I told him — I told him — I was going — going away.” She turned her face wildly to the cushions again. Her young shoulders shook as if they might break. “Women — women — they always—”

CHAPTER V .
    BY a strange mishap of management, the train which bore Coleman back toward New York was fetched into an obscure side-track of some lonely region and there compelled to bide a change of fate. The engine wheezed and sneezed like a paused fat man. The lamps in the cars pervaded a stuffy odor of smoke and oil. Coleman examined his case and found only one cigar. Important brakemen proceeded rapidly along the aisles, and when they swung open the doors, a polar wind circled the legs of the passengers. “Well, now, what is all this for?” demanded Coleman,