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 ment, with the promise of a travelling salesman's job waiting a few months ahead. This was the present deadlock, but Gareth foresaw victory in the future, assured, perhaps, by the memory that his mother had eventually won in every similar encounter. Only one terrible obstacle, aside from his present indifference, stood between him and the goal. His mother, he knew, was suffering both from heart trouble and a tumorous growth. In a short time, whatever the condition of her heart, Dr. Sinclair had informed her, an operation would be necessary. Under these unfavourable conditions, Gareth could not bear to see her continue to struggle with his boorish father.

It was not his parents alone, however, that Gareth understood; they and his books and his relations with Clara had helped him to understand himself and through himself to understand others, at least as they reacted towards him. He was not vain, or conceited, but he was quite aware that he possessed his fair share of good looks, and a certain magnetism, largely due, he had come to believe, to his congenital indifference (as a child, he remembered, ladies used to stop to pet him on the street, partly, he now fancied, because he had been so bored by these attentions), and that his mind worked at a rate several hundred degrees higher than the town average. Therefore, since the day that he had gone birds'-nesting with Miss Colman, he had sensed the fact that she was in love with him. This, he