There had been moments when the range-rider’s heart had quickened with a wild, insurgent hope.  One of these had been on a morning when they were riding in the Park, knee to knee, in the dawn of a new clean world.  It had come to him with a sudden clamor of the blood that in the eternal rightness of things such mornings ought to be theirs till the youth in them was quenched in sober age.  He had looked into the eyes of this slim young Diana, and he had throbbed to the certainty that she too in that moment of tangled glances knew a sweet confusion of the blood.  In her cheeks there had been a quick flame of flying color.  Their talk had fallen from them, and they had ridden in a shy, exquisite silence from which she had escaped by putting her horse to a canter.

But in the sober sense of sanity Clay knew that this wonderful thing was not going to happen to him.  He was not going to be given her happiness to hold in the hollow of his hand.  Bee Whitford was a modern young woman, practical-minded, with a proper sense of the values that the world esteems.  Clarendon Bromfield was a catch even in New York.  He was rich, of a good family, assured social position, good-looking, and manifestly in love with her.  Like gravitates to like the land over.  Miracles no longer happen in this workaday world.  She would marry the man a hundred other girls would have given all they had to win, and perhaps in the long years ahead she might look back with a little sigh for the wild colt of the desert who had shared some perfect moments with her once upon a time.

Bromfield, too, had no doubt that Bee meant to marry him.  He was in love with her as far as he could be with anybody except himself.  His heart was crusted with selfishness.  He had lived for himself only and he meant to continue so to live.  But he had burned out his first youth.  He was coming to the years when dissipation was beginning to take its toll of him.  And as he looked into the future it seemed to him an eminently desirable thing that the fresh, eager beauty of this girl should belong to him, that her devotion should stand as a shield between him and that middle age with which he was already skirmishing.  He wanted her—­the youth, the buoyant life, the gay, glad comradeship of her—­and he had always been lucky in getting what he desired.  That was the use of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

But though Clarendon Bromfield had no doubt of the issue of his suit, the friendship of Beatrice for this fellow from Arizona stabbed his vanity.  It hurt his class pride and his personal self-esteem that she should take pleasure in the man’s society.  Bee never had been well broken to harness.  He set his thin lips tight and resolved that he would stand no nonsense of this sort after they were married.  If she wanted to flirt it would have to be with some one in their own set.

The clubman was too wise to voice his objections now except by an occasional slur.  But he found it necessary sometimes to put a curb on his temper.  The thing was outrageous—­damnably bad form.  Sometimes it seemed to him that the girl was gratuitously irritating him by flaunting this bounder in his face.  He could not understand it in her.  She ought to know that this man did not belong to her world—­could not by any chance be a part of it.