were of a class in themselves, and could not and should not mix with other classes.  Mrs. de Laney entertained a horror of vulgarity.  So deep-rooted was this horror that a remote taint of it was sufficient to thrust forever outside the pale of her approbation any unfortunate who exhibited it.  She preferred stupidity to common sense, when the former was allied with good form, and the latter only with plain kindliness.  This was partly instinct and partly the result of cultivation.  She would shrink, with uncontrollable disgust, from any of the lower classes with whom she came unavoidably in contact.  A slight breach of the conventions earned her distrust of one of her own caste.  As this personal idiosyncrasy fell in line with the de Laney pride, it was approved by the head of the family.  Under encouragement it became almost a monomania.

Bennington pictured to himself only too vividly the effect of the Lawtons on this lady’s aristocratic prejudices.  He knew, only too well, that Bill Lawton’s table manners would not be allowed even in her kitchen.  He could imagine Mrs. Lawton’s fatuous conversation in the de Laney’s drawing-room, or Maude Eliza’s dressed-up self-consciousness.  The experience of having the three Westerners to dinner just once would, Bennington knew, drive his lady mother to the verge of nervous prostration—­he remembered his father’s one and only experience in bringing business connections home to lunch—­; his imagination failed to picture the effect of her having to endure them as actual members of the family!  As if this were not bad enough, his restless fancy carried him a step farther.  He perceived the agonies of shame and mortification, real even though they were conventional, she would have to endure in the face of society.  That the de Laneys, social leaders, rigid in respectability, should be forced to the humiliation of acknowledging a misalliance, should be forced to the added humiliation of confessing that this marriage was not only with a family of inferior social standing, but with one actually unlettered and vulgar!  Bennington knew only too well the temper of his mother—­and of society.

It would not be difficult to expand these doubts, to amplify these reasons, and even to adduce others which occurred to the unhappy young man as he climbed the hill.  But enough has been said.  Surely the reader, no matter how removed in sympathy from that line of argument, must be able now at least to sympathize, to perceive that Bennington de Laney had some reason for thought, some excuse for the tardiness of his steps as they carried him to a meeting with the girl he loved.

For he did love her, perhaps the more tenderly that doubts must, perforce, arise.  All these considerations affected not at all his thought of her.  But now, for the first time, Bennington de Laney was weighing the relative claims of duty and happiness.  His happiness depended upon his love.  That his duty to his race, his parents, his caste had some reality in fact, and a very solid reality in his own estimation, the author hopes he has shown.  If not, several pages have been written in vain.