"Then I'll stay out," announced Jack coolly as Sylvia rose with apologies and followed her captor.
Left alone, Jack lit a cigarette and strode to and fro in the little balcony thinking as hard as perhaps he had ever thought in his twenty-six rather heedless happy-go-lucky years. If ever a man takes square account of himself it is at the moment when he desires with all his heart and soul to win a woman. As young men go, Jack Amidon was as clean and fine as most, considerably more so than might have been expected, in fact, considering his easy-going temperament and unlimited income. But being merely negatively decent was not enough to offer Sylvia Arden. Not even shrewd old Angus McIntosh knew that better than Jack himself.
"Man indeed!" he muttered in the course of his march. "I suppose if I had studied like sin and turned into a saw bones like old Phil she would have had some use for me." The thought of Phil Lorrimer sent his thoughts on a different tangent. For with that uncanny perceptive power which Sylvia herself granted him he knew far better than Sylvia knew that if it had been Phil instead of himself who had been besieging the Princess of the hill top that evening for the boon of her hand and heart a different answer might have been forthcoming. Phil, at least, fulfilled the initial requirement. He was a man, every inch of him. Jack vouchsafed him that just as he had admitted the other lad deserved Sylvia's favor even at his own expense back in the days of the Christmas family.
It was odd how history repeated itself. Just as in that old time, Sylvia had set himself a task to "mend his fences" as she had whimsically expressed it, so she was again bidding him gird on his armor if he would win her respect without which her love was an impossibility. As if it were yesterday Jack remembered that night among the snow-laden pines, out under the stars, when Sylvia had gravely and simply without any preaching, Sylvia fashion, turned him aside from paths already beginning to be dangerous to safer, cleaner ways. Come to think of it, it had always been Sylvia who had pointed him starward, Sylvia only who believed in him enough to swear him into knighthood. Now that they were no longer boy and girl it was the prize of her love which would send him into the fray. Already he had experienced his accolade.