together until long after midnight.  Barclay was a keen, aggressively energetic person, who lived in a continual rush of affairs, which had not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist.  He was married to an invalid wife, who, as he now told Kemper, was threatened with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the Adirondacks.  Kemper had seen her once, and though she was neither pretty nor intelligent, he remembered her with respect as the owner of a property of forty millions.  The knowledge of this fact covered her with a certain distinction in his mind, and because of it he condoned almost unconsciously the absence in her of any more personal attraction than that of wealth.  The marriage, so far as he could judge, had been, from Barclay’s point of view, entirely satisfactory—­domestic affairs occupied no place whatever in the man’s existence, which was devoted exclusively to speculation in stocks; and he had solved the eternal problem of philosophy by reducing life, not to a formula, but to a figure.  Of scandal there had never blown the faintest breath about him; he paid apparently as little attention to other women as to his wife; and money, Kemper decided now, not without an irrational envy, appeared to satisfy as well as absorb his every instant.

“Yes, it’s a great thing to get back to the woods now and then,” Barclay was saying, “I usually manage to run up for Sunday—­and then I find time to look over all the news of the week.”

By “news,” Kemper was aware he meant only the changes in the stock market; but his recognition that the man had not so much as a casual interest above the accumulation of wealth, did not detract in the least from the admiration with which Barclay inspired him.  This was a life that counted! he thought with generous enthusiasm; and success incarnate, he felt, was riding beside him in the train.

Barclay had drawn a paper from his pocket, and was following the list of figures with the point of his toothpick.  Though there was but one subject upon which he possessed even the rudiments of knowledge, the fact that he could speak with authority in a single department of life had conferred upon him a certain dignity of manner; and so Kemper, as he fell into conversation with him, found himself wishing that he might arrange to be thrown with him during the month of his vacation.  Money, though he himself was ignorant of it, possessed almost as vital an attraction for him as he found in love.

But the next morning, when he descended from the train and saw Laura awaiting him against a green background of forest, all recollection of Barclay and his financial genius, was swept from his thoughts.  As he looked at her small distinguished figure, and met her charming eyes, radiant with love, he told himself that he had, indeed, got to the good place in his life at last.  The pressure of her hand, the surrender in her look, the tremor of her voice, appealed to his inflammable senses with a freshness which he found as delicious as the dawn in which they stood.