Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE ANCIENT MARINER GILBERT CLINCH'S visit to Mrs. Broder- ick, with its resultant compact, had furnished him with a bewildering amount of food for thought. Eight years before, he had been the guest of a fellow-student in a roomy old farmhouse in the Vermont hills, occupied for the summer by a hospitable family. Isabel Steele had come there to visit the daughter, who studied with her in the art school. She was then eighteen, badly dressed and angular, with a manner alternately shy and impulsive, and only by fits and starts gave a promise of the charm that was later to make her a well-known society woman. The bewitching hand of midsummer was laid on these two impetuous young hearts, and certain sentimental scenes were a foregone conclusion. But they were both poor and ambitious; both straining every nerve to conquer the difficulties that barred their chosen careers. They had both served their apprenticeship in the school of small daily self-denials for a dominant purpose. And so, with the summer their companionship had ended, each going back to their work choking down a certain heartache. The next spring Gilbert had heard of Miss Steele's going abroad, and, within the year, of her marriage to Andrew Broderick, the only son of the millionaire, said to be, on his own account, an artist of much promise. " Rather an unfair deal of the fates, to have given him the brains that poor men need," Gilbert had commented to himself somewhat bitterly, as he read the glowing accounts of the marriage in the paper. In the changes of the next few years, that bitterness had all died away, and it was with a kindly interest that he noted the varied statements about Mrs. Broderick's social successes, her dresses, and entertainments, the occasional pictures she ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.