“No! no!  If I did not stand clear and free in my shoes do you think I’d dare do what I’m doing?  Do you suppose I’d ask a girl to face with me a world in which I owed a penny?  Do you suppose I’m afraid of that world?—­or of a soul in it?  Do you suppose I can’t take a living out of it?”

Suddenly Selwyn crushed the boy’s hand.

“Then take it!—­and her, too!” he said between his teeth; and turned on his heel, resting his arms on the mantel and his head face downward between them.

So Gerald went away in the pride and excitement of buoyant youth to take love as he found it and where he found it—­though he had found it only as the green bud of promise which unfolds, not to the lover, but to love.  And the boy was only one of many on whom the victory might have fallen; but such a man becomes the only man when he takes what he finds for himself—­green bud, half blown, or open to its own deep fragrant heart.  To him that hath shall be given, and much forgiven.  For it is the law of the strong and the prophets:  and a little should be left to that Destiny which the devout revere under a gentler name.

* * * * *

The affair made a splash in the social puddle, and the commotion spread outside of it.  Inside the nine-and-seventy cackled; outside similar gallinaceous sounds.  Neergard pored all day over the blue-pencilled column, and went home, stunned; the social sheet which is taken below stairs and read above was full of it, as was the daily press and the mouths of people interested, uninterested, and disinterested, legitimately or otherwise, until people began to tire of telling each other exactly how it happened that Gerald Erroll ran away with Gladys Orchil.

Sanxon Orchil was widely quoted as suavely and urbanely deploring the premature consummation of an alliance long since decided upon by both families involved; Mrs. Orchil snapped her electric-blue eyes and held her peace—­between her very white teeth; Austin Gerard, secretly astounded with admiration for Gerald, received the reporters with a countenance expressive of patient pain, but downtown he made public pretence of busy indifference, as though not fully alive to the material benefit connected with the unexpected alliance.  Nina wept—­happily at moments—­at moments she laughed—­because she had heard all about the famous British invasion planned by the Orchils and abetted by Anglo-American aristocracy.  She did not laugh too maliciously; she simply couldn’t help it.  Her set was not the Orchils’ set, their ways were not her ways; their orbits merely intersected occasionally; and, left to herself and the choice hers, she would not have troubled herself to engineer any such alliance, even to stir up Mrs. Sanxon Orchil.  Besides, deep in her complacent little New York soul she had the faintest germ of contempt for the Cordova ancestors of the house of Orchil.