In Her Own Right

by John Reed Scott

“Rather an uncertain quantity.”

“It depends entirely on yourself.—If you start with it, you can hold it, if you take the trouble to try.”

“You’re a strong partisan!” Croyden laughed, as they entered Clarendon.

“And what are you?” Macloud returned.

“Just what I should like to know——”

“Well, I’ll tell you what you are if you don’t marry Elaine Cavendish,” Macloud interrupted—“You’re an unmitigated fool!”

“Assuming that Miss Cavendish would marry me.”

“You’re not likely to marry her, otherwise,” retorted Macloud, as he went up the stairs. On the landing he halted and looked down at Croyden in the hall below. “And if you don’t take your chance, the chance she has deliberately offered you by coming to Hampton, you are worse than——” and, with an expressive gesture, he resumed the ascent.

“How do you know she came down here just for that purpose?” Croyden called.

But all that came back in answer, as Macloud went down the hall and into his room, was the whistled air from a popular opera, then running in the Metropolis.