Suddenly he felt a curious sensation in a spot in his right side, and he was standing in a dewy glade in a piece of woodland on a Spring morning, looking at a slim, serious young man standing very straight and still a few paces off, with a pistol gripped in his hand, and, queerly enough, his name, too, was Norman Wentworth.

But he was not thinking of him.

He was thinking of a tall girl with calm blue eyes, whom he had walked with the day before, and who had sent him away dazed and half maddened.

Then some one a little to one side spoke a few words and began to count, "One, two--" There was a simultaneous report of two pistols, two little puffs of smoke, and when the smoke had cleared away, the other man with the pistol was sinking slowly to the ground, and he himself was tottering into the arms of the man nearest him.
He came back to the present with a gasp.
"My son," he said gravely, "I once was called on and failed.

I have regretted it all my life, though happily the consequences were not as fatal as I had at one time apprehended.