the day was going on, the question he could not ask her tickling
at the founts of speech--Was she going riding next Sunday? And
as he looked, he wondered how old she was, and what love passages
she had had, must have had, with those college whippersnappers
with whom, according to Morrison, she herded and danced. His
mind was very full of her, those six days between the Sundays,
and one thing he came to know thoroughly well; he wanted her.
And so much did he want her that his old timidity of the
apron-string was put to rout. He, who had run away from women
most of his life, had now grown so courageous as to pursue. Some
Sunday, sooner or later, he would meet her outside the office,
somewhere in the hills, and then, if they did not get acquainted,
it would be because she did not care to get acquainted.

Thus he found another card in the hand the mad god had dealt him.

How important that card was to become he did not dream, yet he
decided that it was a pretty good card. In turn, he doubted.
Maybe it was a trick of Luck to bring calamity and disaster upon
him. Suppose Dede wouldn't have him, and suppose he went on
loving her more and more, harder and harder? All his old
generalized terrors of love revived. He remembered the
disastrous love affairs of men and women he had known in the
past. There was Bertha Doolittle, old Doolittle's daughter, who
had been madly in love with Dartworthy, the rich Bonanza fraction
owner; and Dartworthy, in turn, not loving Bertha at all, but
madly loving Colonel Walthstone's wife and eloping down the Yukon
with her; and Colonel Walthstone himself, madly loving his own
wife and lighting out in pursuit of the fleeing couple. And what
had been the outcome? Certainly Bertha's love had been