Forty thousand words--and that is the number we have piled up in this story--is a large number of words to string together without a heroine.

That is almost as bad as the dictionary, in which He and She are always hundreds of pages apart and never meet,--not even in the "Z's" at the end,--which is why the dictionary is so unpopular, perhaps.

But this is the story of a man, and naturally it must have many heroines.

For you know men--they are all alike! First, Mrs.Mary Barclay was a heroine--you saw her face, strong and clean and sharply chiselled with a great purpose; then Miss Lucy--black-eyed, red-cheeked, slender little Miss Lucy--was a heroine, but she married General Ward; and then Ellen Culpepper was a heroine, but she fluttered out of the book into the sunlight, and was gone; and then came Jane Mason,--and you have seen her girlish beauty, and you will see it develop into gentle womanhood; but the real heroine,--of the real story,--you have not seen her face.

You have heard her name, and have seen her moving through these pages with her back consciously turned to you--for being a shy minx, she had no desire to intrude until she was properly introduced.