Please hurry." She left him, not without an impulsive movement as though she meant to utter some further words of thanks, but checked her intent on the very threshold of speech.

As the lock of the bedroom door clicked, and he was alone, he essayed a review of the amazing sequence of events which had befallen since he strolled out of the dining-room of the Central Hotel.

He stood there, motionless, with hands plunged deep in his pockets, but, at the outset of a reverie in which judgment and prudence might have helped in the council, he happened to catch sight of himself in an oblong mirror over the mantelpiece, for the apartment, redolent of New York's later architecture, contained an open grate, and was furnished with the chaste beauty of the Chippendale period.

In his present position the reflection in the mirror was oddly reminiscent of a half-length portrait of his grandfather, the warrior who rode at the head of the Fifth Cavalry in '61.
Then Curtis laughed, with the pleasant conviction of a man whose mind has been made up for him by circumstances beyond his control.
"It's bred in the bone--a clear case of Mendelism," he murmured softly, because he had just remembered how Colonel Curtis, before ever the war was ended and its bitterness assuaged, had decided a Southern girl's conflict between love and duty by galloping fifty miles across Confederate South Carolina and carrying off the lady.
Grandfather and grandson alike were men of action.

Curtis seldom used a gesture, and never cried over spilt milk.