The Wild Olive

ash of revelation in which he saw himself and his limitations clearly defined. His success at Rosario had been such

t had been gathered to his rest, taking his secret with him-penitent, reconciled to the Church, and fortified with the Last

other name than that of the Wild Olive. He had invested it, and reinvested it, till it had become a fund of some importance. Putting it now into the safest American securities, he placed them in the hands of a firm of English solicitors in Buenos Aires, with directions not only to

d prudential. He was unwilling to risk anything that could connect him ever so indirectly with the life of Norrie Ford. Secondly, he was conscious of a vague shrinking from the payment of this

res. Events during the last six years had pressed so fast on each other, life had been so full, so ardent, each minute had been so insistent that he should give it his whole soul's attention, that the antecedent past was

endowed him with young vigor. He owed her everything. He had told her so. He had vowed his life to her. It was to be hers to dispose of, even at her caprice. It was what he had meant

ept what he had done about the money. Life was not over yet; and some day the chance might come to prove himself as high-souled as h

ed that placed him in a new attitude, not on

for the theatres and the opera, for strollings at Palermo, and for standing stock-still watching the procession of carriages in the Florida or the A

rich-their heavy, swarthy wives, come out to display all the jewels that could be conveniently worn at once-pretty, dark-eyed girls, already with a fatal tendency to embonpoint, wearing diamonds in their ears and round their necks as an added glory to costumes fresh from the rue de la Paix-grave little boys, in gloves and patent-leather boots, seated without budging by their mammas, sucking the tops of their canes in imitation of their elder brothers, who wandered about in pairs or groups, all

ell as a few tiny wrinkles of concentration about the eyes, gave him an air of maturity beyond his age of thirty-two. The Anglo-Saxon influence in the Argentine is English-from which cause he had insensibly taken on an English air, as his speech had acquired something of the English intonation. He was often told that he might pass for an

mourning. Whether or not she was aware of the gaze of the passers-by it was difficult to guess, for her air of demure simplicity was proof against penetration. She was one of those dainty little creatures who seem to see best with the eyes downcast; but when she lifted her dark lashes, the darker from contrast with the golden hair, to sweep heaven and earth in a blue glance that belon

ctric; as for her, she gave no sign further than that she opened her parasol and raised it to shade her face. Having done this she continued to sit in und

e, but the higher, purer aspirations that accompanied it. It was not, so he said to himself, a chance meeting; it was one which the ages had prepared, and led him up to. She was "his type of girl" only in so far as she distilled the essence of his gross imaginings and gave them in their exquisite rea

o be awakened as from a trance when Miss Jarrott, very y

ple's thoughts. Why do you suppose it is? I don't know. Do you? When I see people, I can tell what they're thinking of as well as anything. I'm like that; but I can't tell how I do it. I saw

elf in peril. In being presented to the Misses Martin and their group, he was actually entering that Organized Society to which Herbert Strange had no attachments, and in which he could thrust down no roots. By

He had not come to their dance, nor "called," nor shown them any of the civilities they were accustomed to look for from young men. Turn

his impressions were subconscious-to be brought to the surface and dwelt on after he went away. It was thus he recorded the facts relating to the gold tint-the teint doré-of her complexion, the curl of her lashes that seemed to him deep chestnut rather than quite black, as well as the l

know that they were blue, but he got a throb of bliss from it, as does one from the gleam of a sunlit sea. To her answers to the questions he asked as to when she had arrived, how she liked the Argentine, and what she thought of the Hipodrom

was eager to go, to be alone, to think, to feel, to suffer, to realize, to trace step by step the minutes of the day till they had led him to the supreme instant when his

ott began, just as he was about to take his

olfax fluted, with that pretty way she had o

asual and yet haunting-meaningless and yet more than pregnant-creeping through