“But he reckoned without his host,” Stoddard continued. “The young ladies, I have lately learned, call me Pauline, as a mark of regard or otherwise,—probably otherwise. I give two lectures a week on church history, and I fear my course isn’t popular.”

“But it is something, on the other hand, to be in touch with such an institution. They are a very sightly company, those girls. I enjoy watching them across the garden wall. And I had a closer view of them at the station this morning, when you ran off and deserted me.”

He laughed, his big wholesome cheering laugh.

“I take good care not to see much of them socially.”

“Afraid of the eternal feminine?”

“Yes, I suppose I am. I’m preparing to go into a And girls Brotherhood, as you probably don’t know. are distracting.”

I glanced at my companion with a new inquiry and interest.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Yes; I’m spending my year in studies that I may never have a chance for hereafter. I’m going into an order whose members work hard.”

He spoke as though he were planning a summer outing. I had not sat at meat with a clergyman since the death of my parents broke up our old home in Vermont, and my attitude toward the cloth was, I fear, one of antagonism dating from those days.

“Well, I saw Pickering after all,” I remarked.

“Yes, I saw him, too. What is it in his case, genius or good luck ?”

“I’m not a competent witness,” I answered. “I’ll be frank with you: I don’t like him; I don’t believe in him.”

“Oh ! I beg your pardon. I didn’t know, of course.”

“The subject is not painful to me,” I hastened to add, “though he was always rather thrust before me as an ideal back in my youth, and you know how fatal that is. And then the gods of success have opened all the gates for him.”

“Yes,—and yet—”

“And yet—” I repeated. Stoddard lifted a glass of sherry to the light and studied it for a moment. He did not drink wine, but was not, I found, afraid to look at it.

“And yet,” he said, putting down the glass and speaking slowly, “when the gates of good fortune open too readily and smoothly, they may close sometimes rather too quickly and snap a man’s coat-tails. Please don’t think I’m going to afflict you with shavings of wisdom from the shop-floor, but life wasn’t intended to be too easy. The spirit of man needs arresting and chastening. It doesn’t flourish under too much fostering or too much of what we call good luck. I’m disposed to be afraid of good luck.”

“I’ve never tried it,” I said laughingly.

“I am not looking for it,” and he spoke soberly.