Dan rose and paced the floor, while Allen stood watching him eagerly and pouring his heart out.  Dan felt that tragedy loomed here.  He did not doubt Allen’s sincerity; he was not unmoved by his manner, his voluble description of all the phases of his happiness.  Allen, with all his faults and weaknesses, had nevertheless a sound basis of character.  Harwood’s affection for him dated from that first encounter in the lonely Meridian Street house when the boy had dawned upon him in his overalls and red silk stockings.  He had never considered Allen’s interest in Marian serious; for Allen had to Dan’s knowledge paid similar attentions to half a dozen other girls.  Allen’s imagination made a goddess of every pretty girl, and Dan had settled down to the belief that his friend saw in Marian only one of the many light-footed Dianas visible in the city thoroughfares, whom he invested with deific charms and apostrophized in glowing phrases.  But that he should marry Marian—­Marian, the joyous and headstrong; Marian the romping, careless Thalia of Allen’s bright galaxy!  She was ill-fitted for marriage, particularly to a dreamy, emotional youngster like Allen.  And yet, on the other hand, if she had arrived at a real appreciation of Allen’s fineness and gentleness and had felt his sweetness and charm, why not?

Dan’s common sense told him that quite apart from the young people themselves there were reasons enough against it.  Dan had imagined that Allen was content to play at being in love; that it satisfied the romantic strain in him, just as his idealization of the Great Experiment and its actors expressed and satisfied his patriotic feelings.  The news that he had come to terms of marriage with Marian was in all the circumstances dismaying, and opened many dark prospects.  Allen stood at the window staring across the roofs beyond.  He whirled round as Dan addressed him.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Bassett?  You know that will be the first thing, Allen.”

“That’s exactly what I want you to help me about?  He’s at Waupegan now, and of course I’ve got to see him.  But you know this row between him and dad makes it hard.  You know dad would do anything in the world for me—­dear old dad!  Of course I’ve told him.  And you’d be surprised to see the way he took it.  You know people don’t know dad the way I do.  They think he’s just a rough old chap, without any fine feeling about anything.  And mother and the girls leaving him that way has hurt him; it hurts him a whole lot.  And when I told him last night, up at that big hollow cave of a house, how happy I was and all that, it broke him all up.  He cried, you know—­dad cried!”

The thought of Edward G. Thatcher in tears failed to arrest the dark apprehensions that tramped harshly through Dan’s mind.  As for Bassett, Dan recalled his quondam chief’s occasional flings at Allen, whom the senator from Fraser had regarded as a spoiled and erratic but innocuous trifler.  Mrs. Bassett, Dan was aware, valued her social position highly.  As the daughter of Blackford Singleton she considered herself unassailably a member of the upper crust of the Hoosier aristocracy.  And Dan suspected that Bassett also harbored similar notions of caste.