CHAPTER XI.
Mr.Barker's urgent engagement up town that evening must have been to meet some one; but considering that the individual he might be supposed to be awaiting did not come, he showed a remarkable degree of patience.
He went to a certain quiet club and ordered, with the utmost care, a meal after his own heart--for one; and though several members hailed him and greeted him on his return, he did not seem particularly interested in what they had to say, but sat solitary at his small square table with its exquisite service; and when he had eaten, and had finished his modest pint of Pommery Sec, he drank his coffee and smoked his own cigars in undisturbed contemplation of the soft-tinted wall-paper, and in calm, though apparently melancholy, enjoyment of the gentle light that pervaded the room, and of the sweet evening breeze that blew in from the trees of Madison Square, so restful after the dust and discomfort of the hot September day.
Whoever it was that he awaited did not come, and yet Mr.Barker exhibited no sign of annoyance.

He went to another room, and sat in a deep arm-chair with a newspaper which he did not read, and once he took a scrap of paper from his pocket and made a short note upon it with a patent gold pencil.

It was a very quiet club, and Mr.Barker seemed to be its quietest member.

And well he might be, for he had made up his mind on a grave point.

He had determined to marry.
He had long known it must come, and had said to himself more than once that "to every man upon this earth death cometh, soon or late;" but being human, he had put off the evil day, having always thought that it must, of necessity, be evil.