Her mother bore his absence with a like stoicism.  That astute matron had long and silently deprecated the regularity with which her Louis Quinze had groaned beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of ineligibility, the frequency with which a tall troup horse of spectacular gait and snortings could be descried beside her daughter’s English hunter in the park, the strange chain of coincidence by which at theater, house party, dinner, or even church, Jimmie smiling and unabashed, would find his way to her daughter’s side and monopolize her daughter’s attention.

In the excitement of the first stages of one of her expeditions into another’s territory, Jimmie’s first letter arrived.  It was mailed at Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement:  “There is no girl on the boat.  She is a widow, but lots of fun.”  And it changed the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a determined attack upon its fortresses.  And so Gilbert Stevenson, millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and more campaigns, found himself engaged to Miss Sylvia Knowles just when, after a long and careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm:  “that dear little girl of old Marvin’s,” as he described the lady of his choice, “his only child and a good child, too.”  He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity.  Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum.  But that “dear little girl of old Marvin’s” could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and spirit in one desolate month.

Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard.  She did not want to keep him.  In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiance.  And the methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted upon except the unaccountable.  So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when “that good child of old Marvin’s” had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general—­and Mr. Stevenson in particular—­began to bore Miss Knowles, and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters.  She considerately spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie himself.  “Has a nasty suspicious mind,” she reflected, “and a nasty jealous disposition.  I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my friends when I marry him.”