was being married so short a distance away, and envy in a general sense, with no reference even to Charlotte, swept over him.  He had never been disturbed in very great measure with longing for the happiness that the other man was laying hold of, but even that fact served to augment his sense of injury and resentment.  He felt that it was due to circumstances, in a very large degree to the inevitable decrees of his fate, that he had not had the longing, and not to any inherent lack of his own nature.  He felt that he had had a double loss in both the hunger and the satisfaction of it, and now, after all, had come at last this absurd and hopeless affection which had lately possessed him.  To-night the affection, instead of seeming to warm the heart of a nobly patient and reasonable man, seemed to sting it.

Suddenly out of the hot murk of the night came a little puff of cool wind, and borne on it a faint strain of music.  Anderson listened.  The music came again.

“It cannot be possible that the wedding is just about to begin,” he thought, “not at this hour.”

But that was quite possible with the Carrolls, who, with the exception of the head of the family, had never been on time in their lives.  It was nearly nine o’clock, and the guests had been sitting in a subdued impatience amid the wilting flowers and greens in the church, and the minister had been trying to keep in a benedictory frame of mind in a stuffy little retiring-room, and now the wedding-party were just entering the church.  A sudden impulse seized Anderson.  He stole inside the house, and looked and listened in the hall.  Everything was dark up-stairs, and silent.  Mrs. Anderson always fell asleep like a baby immediately upon going to bed.

Anderson got his hat from the hall-tree, and went out, closing the door with its spring-lock very cautiously.  Then he slipped around the house and listened.  He could hear a soft, cooing murmur of voices from the back stoop.  The servant, as usual, was keeping tryst there with her lover.  He walked a little farther and came upon their consolidated shadow of love under the wild-cucumber vine which wreathed over the trellis-hood of the door.  The girl gave a little shriek and a giggle, the man, partly pushed, partly of his own volition, started away from her and stood up with an incoherent growl of greeting.

“Good-evening,” said Anderson.  “Jane, I am going out, and my mother has gone up-stairs.  If you will be kind enough to have a little attention in case she should ring.”  Anderson had fixed an electric bell in his mother’s room, which communicated with the kitchen.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, with a sound between a gasp and a giggle.

“I have locked the front-door,” said Anderson.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, again.

Anderson went around the house, and the sound of an embarrassed and happy laugh floated after him.  He felt again the sense of injury and resentment, as if he were shut even out of places where he would not care to be, even out of the humblest joys of life, out of the kitchens as well as the palaces.