He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity.  Now that he had caught the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor, how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting.  He was conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as though she were some compatriot prima-donna.  He could see already how well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill the part.  It had been written for her.  Its strong points and its subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.

This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning of dinner—­the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated.  He saw now that it was a field on which he never could have won.  Within “the best Boston society” he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods.  That he was no longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the nightingale for the moon.

* * * * *

By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion say: 

“That’s all very fine, but a man doesn’t risk everything he holds dear in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it.  You may depend upon it he had a reason.”

“Oh, he had a reason,” Mrs. Fane agreed—­“the reason of being hard up.  The trouble lay in its not being good enough.”

“I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil.”

“But not for any one else.  He was drummed out.  There wasn’t a soul in the regiment to speak to him.  We heard that he took another name and went abroad.  Anyhow, he disappeared.  It was all he could do.  He was lucky to get off with that; wasn’t he, Peter? wasn’t he, father?”

“What he got off with,” said Guion, “was a quality of tragic interest which never pertains to the people who stick to the Street called Straight.”

“Oh, certainly,” Mrs. Fane assented, dryly.  “He did acquire that.  But I’m surprised to hear you commend it; aren’t you, father? aren’t you, Peter?”

“I’m not commending it,” Guion asserted; “I only feel its force.  I’ve a great deal of sympathy with any poor beggar in his—­downfall.”