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“A nice girl!” quoth the young lady of Englewood fiercely. “You know no nice girl would allow it. Nice girl, indeed. You think so. You know no nice girl would let you do such a thing,” and she slammed the door in his face.

Away went Mr. Middleton with his heart full of bitterness because she would not let him do such a thing, and in the hallway stood the young lady of Englewood with her heart full of bitterness because he had tried to do such a thing and because she could not let him do such a thing.

“Much good was the philter,” said Mr. Middleton, remembering the emir’s gift, but almost at the same time, he recalled that the philter had not been on his forehead when he attempted to embrace the young lady of Englewood, for he had held his hat in his hand.

The farther he departed from her, the more his resentment grew, and he declared to himself that he would never have anything more to do with her. She was ungrateful, cold, haughty, not at all the kind of girl he could wish as his partner for life. He would proceed to let her see that he could do without her. He would cast her image from the temple of his heart and never go near her again. For a moment, he was disturbed by the thought that perhaps she would decline to receive him, even if he should call, but he quickly banished this unpleasant reflection and fell to devising means by which he might make it clearly apparent to the young lady of Englewood that he did not care.

“I’ll make her sorry. I’ll show her I don’t care, I’ll show her I don’t care.”

There is a restaurant under the basement of one of the larger and more celebrated saloons of the city, where a genial Gaul provides, for the modest sum of fifty cents, a course dinner, with wine. The wine is but ordinary California claret, but the viands are excellently cooked and of themselves sufficient inducement for a wight to part with half a dollar without consideration of the wine. There are those who, in the melancholy state that follows a disappointment in love, go without food and drink, while others turn to undue indulgence in drink. There are yet others, though few observers seem to have noted them, who turn toward greater indulgence in food, seeking surcease and forgetfulness of the pains of the heart in benefactions to the stomach.

It was very seldom that Mr. Middleton spent so much as fifty cents upon a meal, but the conduct of the young lady of Englewood having deprived him of any present object for laying up money, and, moreover, the pains of the heart before alluded to demanding the vicarious offices of the stomach, he went to the little French restaurant the next evening.

It was somewhat late when he arrived and there were in the room but two diners beside himself. These were a man and a woman, who by many little obvious evidences made manifest that they were not husband and wife. They had arrived at the dessert and were eating ice cream with genteel slowness, conversing the while with great decorum. Both were tall and fair, singularly well matched as to height and the ample and shapely proportions of their figures, and both were well, though quietly and even simply, dressed. They were nearly of an age, too, he being apparently forty, and she thirty-five. Their years sat lightly upon them, however, and if upon her face there were traces left by the longing for the lover who had not yet come into her life, that was all which upon either countenance betrayed that their lives had been other than care-free and happy. Assuredly, any one would have called them a fine looking man and woman. All this Mr. Middleton observed in a glance or two and then addressed himself to the comestibles that were set before him and doubtless would not have given the couple thought again, had not the waitress at the close of the meal fluttered at his elbows, placing the vinegar cruet and Worcestershire sauce bottle within easy reach, which services caused Mr. Middleton to look up in some wonder, as he was engaged with custard pie and he had never heard of any race of men, however savage, who used vinegar and Worcestershire sauce upon custard pie. The waitress, who was a young woman of a pleasant and intelligent countenance, met this glance with another compounded of mystery and communicativeness, and bending low while she removed the vinegar and Worcestershire sauce to a new station, murmured: