Big Poker Site hazard of new fortunes 59

"I shouldnt think he would come any more." "Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the rest of the winter." "I couldnt help feeling sorry for him. He was quite stupefied. I could see that he didnt know what to make of you." "Hes not required to make anything of me," said Alma. "Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?" "Impossible to say, mamma." "Well, I dont think it was quite right, Alma." "Ill leave him to you the next time. Miss Woodburn said you were freezing him to death when I came down." "That was quite different. But, there wont be any next time, Im afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton. Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. He tried to read when he got to his room; but Almas looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out, and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not expect ever to right himself in Almas esteem, but he hoped some day to let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be a good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her being touched by it under those circumstances. VI. In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice. When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel, and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost healed of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and more literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his resolution against Fulkersons offer. One must call it reasoning, but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the Every Other Week office, and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before. With the prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with Fulkersons enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as high grade as Les Lettres et les Arts, and very much that sort of thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her they were married in Grace Church, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint a picture of it some time. Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due dryness to Fulkersons cheery "Hello, old man!" when he found himself in the building fitted up for the Every Other Week office. Fulkersons room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow old trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed epoch, if not character. "Well, have you come round to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere," Fulkerson went on. "Ive come to bring

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