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THE first faint star stabbing its pinprick of light through the spraddling branches of the mulberry tree held the jeweller's eyes as he pulled the doorbell of the Scovell House. He rang a second time when he heard a rustling of skirts in the dark hallway. He turned expectantly, but it was only the landlady, Miss Scovell, in a slatternly Mother Hubbard dress bringing the lamp to place it on the newel post for the night. She looked to see who was at the door; then, in a voice edged with distaste, directed, rather than invited.

"You go in the parlour—I'll tell her."

She stationed her beacon then went back upstairs mumbling audibly, "Middle-aged old fool—young girl—old enough to be her—" and then mercifully passed out of hearing.

Miss Scovell's detestation was aroused not so much by the jeweller's age as by what he believed. Her mutterings gave the jeweller's thoughts a painful twist. Belshue was two and a half times as old as the girl. Nessie was eighteen. Yet throughout all his forty-five years the jeweller had never deviated in his allegiance to eighteen-year-old girls. Even when he was a little anti-social boy of ten or eleven, young women of eighteen seemed to him the most beautiful, the most comforting creatures in all the world. During his early adolescence, girls of this age filled him with perfervid dreams and desires. In early manhood Belshue's affections were normally engaged. He had plighted himself to marry a girl, then, to his own dismay, had fallen in love with her younger sister. The heretic's love was a sort of fixed spotlight into which and out of which marched a procession of eighteen-year-old girls. In each instance his love had seemed eternal;