the end of three non-committal pages she wrote:
"I ought not to wish you good luck, for Papa says if you have it it will be your ruin. I did not suppose that circumstances could ruin anybody,—anybody that had any backbone, I mean. But I do wish you good luck all the same, and if you're the kind of person to be ruined by it, why, I'm sorry for you!"
There was something in that letter, non-committal as it was, that gave Wakefield the impression that a correspondence would be no furtherance to his interests. He did not write again, and he only knew, from his sister Fanny, that Dorothy was a greater favorite than ever that season; a fact from which he could gather little encouragement. He had flung himself like a piece of driftwood into the whirl of speculation; he had lost more thousands than he cared to think about, the bulk of his patrimony in fact, and his last chance was gone of making the fortune that was to have been the winning of Dorothy. "It takes a man to do that!" she had said.
Well, that was the end of it! As far as he was concerned, Dorothy Ray had ceased to exist; the past had ceased to exist, the pleasant past, with its deceitful mists and bewildering sunbeams. Things out here were
