Sanctuary

Excerpt: ... Peyton hesitated. "The friendship is delightful; but I don't know that my son needs the incentive. He is almost too ambitious." Miss Verney looked up brightly. "Can one be?" she said. "Ambition is so splendid! It must be so glorious to be a man and go crashing through obstacles, straight up to the thing one is after. I'm afraid I don't care for people who are superior to success. I like marriage by capture!" She rose with her wandering laugh, and stood flushed and sparkling above Mrs. Peyton, who continued to gaze at her gravely. "What do you call success?" the latter asked. "It means so many different things." "Oh, yes, I know-the inward approval, and all that. Well, I'm afraid I like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr. Peyton, for instance, I'd much rather win the competition than-than be as disinterested as Mr. Darrow." Mrs. Peyton smiled. "I hope you won't tell him so," she said half seriously. "He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced by any one who-whose opinion he values." She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo the words which another man's mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy. "But we can't help being interested!" she declared. "It's very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his competition is after all of very little account compared with other things-his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking horribly used up." The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the room at Darrow's side. "Oh, do you think so?" she said. "I should have thought it was his friend who was used up." Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour, to which his slow-moving grey eye lent...