“I suppose you disapprove wholly of aristocracies and nobilities, now that you have renounced your title and your father’s earldom.”

“Real ones?  Oh, dear no—­but I’ve thrown aside our sham one for good.”

This answer fell just at the right time and just in the right place, to save the poor unstable young man from changing his political complexion once more.  He had been on the point of beginning to totter again, but this prop shored him up and kept him from floundering back into democracy and re-renouncing aristocracy.  So he went home glad that he had asked the fortunate question.  The girl would accept a little thing like a genuine earldom, she was merely prejudiced against the brummagem article.  Yes, he could have his girl and have his earldom, too:  that question was a fortunate stroke.

Sally went to bed happy, too; and remained happy, deliriously happy, for nearly two hours; but at last, just as she was sinking into a contented and luxurious unconsciousness, the shady devil who lives and lurks and hides and watches inside of human beings and is always waiting for a chance to do the proprietor a malicious damage, whispered to her soul and said, “That question had a harmless look, but what was back of it?—­what was the secret motive of it?—­what suggested it?”

The shady devil had knifed her, and could retire, now, and take a rest; the wound would attend to business for him.  And it did.

Why should Howard Tracy ask that question?  If he was not trying to marry her for the sake of her rank, what should suggest that question to him?  Didn’t he plainly look gratified when she said her objections to aristocracy had their limitations?  Ah, he is after that earldom, that gilded sham—­it isn’t poor me he wants.

So she argued, in anguish and tears.  Then she argued the opposite theory, but made a weak, poor business of it, and lost the case.  She kept the arguing up, one side and then the other, the rest of the night, and at last fell asleep at dawn; fell in the fire at dawn, one may say; for that kind of sleep resembles fire, and one comes out of it with his brain baked and his physical forces fried out of him.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Tracy wrote his father before he sought his bed.  He wrote a letter which he believed would get better treatment than his cablegram received, for it contained what ought to be welcome news; namely, that he had tried equality and working for a living; had made a fight which he could find no reason to be ashamed of, and in the matter of earning a living had proved that he was able to do it; but that on the whole he had arrived at the conclusion that he could not reform the world single-handed, and was willing to retire from the conflict with the fair degree of honor which he had gained, and was also willing to return home and resume his position and be content with it and thankful for it for the future, leaving further experiment