not be safe in his keeping, I had to admit to myself that I was puzzled.  I had regarded my old college chum not only as the best mentally harnessed man I had ever met, but I knew him as the soul of honour, that honour of the old story-books, and I could not credit his being tempted to jeopardise unfairly the rights or property of another.  But it was habit with me to let Bob have his way, and I did not press him to come into our firm as a full partner.

Five years later, during which time affairs, business and social, had been slipping along as well as either Bob or I could have asked, I was preparing for another sit-down to show my chum that the time had now come for him to help me in earnest, when a queer thing happened—­one of those unaccountable incidents that God sometimes sees fit to drop across the life-paths of His children, paths heretofore as straight and far-ahead-visible as highways along which one has never to look twice to see where he is travelling; one of those events that, looked at retrospectively, are beyond all human understanding.

It was a beautiful July Saturday noon and Bob and I had just “packed up” for the day preparatory to joining Mrs. Randolph on my yacht for a run down to our place at Newport.  As we stepped out of his office one of the clerks announced that a lady had come in and had particularly asked to see Mr. Brownley.

“Who the deuce can she be, coming in at this time on Saturday, just when all alive men are in a rush to shake the heat and dirt of business for food and the good air of all outdoors?” growled Bob.  Then he said, “Show her in.”

Another minute and he had his answer.

A lady entered.

“Mr. Brownley?” She waited an instant to make sure he was the Virginian.

Bob bowed.

“I am Beulah Sands, of Sands Landing, Virginia.  Your people know our people, Mr. Brownley, probably well enough for you to place me.”

“Of the Judge Lee Sands’s?” asked Bob, as he held out his hand.

“I am Judge Lee Sands’s oldest daughter,” said the sweetest voice I had ever heard, one of those mellow, rippling voices that start the imagination on a chase for a mocking-bird, only to bring it up at the pool beneath the brook-fall in quest of the harp of moss and watercresses that sends a bubbling cadence into its eddies and swirls.  Perhaps it was the Southern accent that nibbled off the corners and edges of certain words and languidly let others mist themselves together, that gave it its luscious penetration—­however that may be, it was the most no-yesterday-no-tomorrow voice I had ever heard.  Before I grew fully conscious of the exquisite beauty of the girl, this voice of hers spelled its way into my brain like the breath of some bewitching Oriental essence.  Nature, environment, the security of a perfect marriage have ever combined to constitute me loyal to my chosen one, yet as I stood silent, like one dumb, absorbing the details of the loveliness