New Faces

"You'll do nothing of the sort," his uncle contradicted, "the child appealed to me and I am the one to rescue her. I shall interview the manager. I know him. You may come with me if you like."

Down at the desk they accosted the still-courteous clerk. Uncle Richard produced his card, and, before he could ask for the manager the clerk flicked a memorandum out of one pigeon-hole, a key out of another, and twirled the register on its turn-table almost into the midst of the white waistcoat.

"The lady has been expecting you for hours, Mr. Underwood," said he. "Looked for you quite early in the afternoon, so the maid says. Register here, please. Quite hysterical, she is, they tell me, and the maid was asking for the doctor—Front! 625!"

Uncle Richard's face, as he met John's eyes, was a study. The telephone-girl disentangled the receiver from her pompadour so that she might hear without hindrance the speech which was bursting through the swelling buttons of the white waistcoat and making the white whiskers quiver.

"I know nothing whatever about any lady in any of your rooms," he roared, greatly to the delight of the bellboys. "I know nothing about your Underwood woman, with her doctors and her hysterics. I want to see the manager."

"If," said the telephone maiden, adjusting her skirt at the hips and shaking her figure into greater conformity with the ideal she had set before it—"If this gentleman is 2525 Gram., then the lady in 625 rang him up at seven-thirty and held the wire seven minutes talkin' to him and cryin' to beat Sousa's band. All about her uncle she was talkin'. I guess it was him, all right, all right. His voice sounds sort of familiar to me when he talks mad."

But John had neither eyes nor ears for Uncle Richard's wrath. He snatched the key and the paper upon which the supercilious clerk had inscribed, at Marjorie's embarrassed dictation, "Mrs. Underwood, West Hills, N.J. (husband to arrive later), 625 and 6," and, since love is keen, he jumped to the right conclusion and the open elevator without further delay.

An hour or so later the attention of the clerk and the telephone-girl was again drawn to the complicated Blakes. A party of four sauntered out of the dining-room and approached the desk.

"I'll register now, I think," said John. And when he had finished he turned to the star-eyed girl behind him.

"Look carefully at this, Marjorie," he admonished. "Mr. and Mrs. John Blake. You are Mrs. John Blake. Do you think you can remember that?"

"Don't laugh at me," she pleaded, "Gladys says it was a most natural mistake, and so does Bob. Don't you, Gladys and Bob?"

"An almost inevitable mistake," they chorused mendaciously, "but," added Bob, "a rather disastrous mistake for your uncle to explain to his wife, the doctor and the nurse. He'll be able for it, though; I never saw so game an old chap."

"And I'll never do it again," she promised. People never do when they've been married a long, long time, and I feel as though I had been married thousands and thousands of years."

"Poor, tired little girl," said John, "you have had a rather indifferent time of it. Say good-night to Dick and Gladys. Come, my dear."

"But, Win," remonstrated the bride-elect, "I really don't think we could. Wouldn't it look awfully strange? I don't think I ever heard of its being done."

"Neither did I," he agreed. "And yet I want you to do it. Look at it from my point of view. I persuade John Mead to stop wandering around the world and to take an apartment with me here in New York. Then I meet you. The inevitable happens and in less than a year John is to be left desolate. You know how eccentric he is, and how hard it will be for him to get on with any other companion—"

"I know," said Patty, "that he never will find any one—but you—to put up with his eccentricities."

"And then, as if abandoning him were not bad enough, I go and maim the poor beggar: blind him temporarily—permanently, if he is not taken care of—and disfigure him beyond all description. Honestly, Patty, you never saw anything like him."

"I know," said she, "I know. A pair of black eyes."

"Black!" he cried, "why, they're all the colors of the rainbow and two more beside, as the story-book says. All the way from his hair to his mustache he is one lurid sunset. I don't want to minimize this thing. It has only one redeeming feature: he will be a complete disguise. No amount of rice or ribbon could counteract his sinister companionship. No bridal suspicions could live in the light of it. Doesn't that thought help?".

The conversation wandered into personalities and back again, as a conversation may three days before a wedding, but Patty was not entirely won over to Hawley's view of his responsibility for having with unprecedented dexterity and precision planted a smashing "right" on the bridge of his friend's nose in the course of an amicable "bout."

"And the oculist chap says," Winthrop urged, "that he simply must not be allowed to use his eyes. I'm the only one who takes any interest in him or has any control over him, and to abandon him now would be an awful responsibility. Can't you see that, dear? If we stay at home to take care of him he will understand why we're doing it, and he'd vanish. Do let me put him into a motor mask and attach him to the procession."

"Well, of course, Win," Patty answered, "of course we must have him if you feel so strongly about it. It's a pity," she ended mischievously, "that he dislikes me so much."

"That's because you dislike him. But just wait till you know one another."

"I will," she answered with a spirit which promised well for the future. "I'll wait."

And Winthrop was so touched and gratified by her complaisance that he had no alternative, save to duplicate it, when the following evening brought him this communication:

"Kate Perry and I were playing golf this morning. And, oh! Win, it seems just too dreadful! I banged her between the eyes with my driver. I can't think how I ever did it. She's not fit to be seen. Awful! worse than Mr. Mead can possibly be. She can't stay here and she can't go home to Washington.

"So, now, if you will consent, we shall be four instead of three. Let me take poor Kate. She can wear a thick veil and sit in behind with Mr. Mead, in his goggles, and leave the front seats for us. They'll be company for one another."

Winthrop questioned this final sentence. A supercilious, spoiled beauty—a beauty now doubly spoiled and presumedly bad tempered—was hardly an ideal companion for the misanthropic Mead.

The wedding took place in the morning and the beginning of the honeymoon was prosaic enough. Winthrop and Patty sat in the front seat of the throbbing touring car, while hysterical bridesmaids and vengeful groomsmen showered the requisite quantities of rice, confetti and old slippers upon them.

It was at the New York side of the ferry that a shrouded female joined them, and it was at the Hoboken side of the river that a be-goggled young man was added unto her. The bride rushed through the formula of introduction: a readjustment of dress-suit cases and miniature trunks was effected, and the disguise which the bridegroom had predicted was complete. The most romantic onlooker would not have suspected them of concealing a honeymoon about them.

It was nearly six o'clock when at last they reached their destination, the little town of Rapidan, in New Jersey, and stopped before the Empress Hotel. Hawley had visited Rapidan once before, as a member of his college glee club, and he had recalled it instantly when Mead's disfigurement made sequestration imperative.

The motor sobbed itself to a standstill: several children and dogs gathered to inspect it, and then finding more interest and novelty in Mead's mask turned their attention to him.

The Empress had evidently been dethroned for some years, and the hospitality she afforded her guests was of an impoverished sort. Hawley, approaching the desk to make enquiries, was met by a clerk incredibly arrayed, and the intelligence that the whole house was theirs to choose, except for two small rooms on the third floor occupied by two gentlemen who "traveled" respectively in sarsaparilla and molasses.

Hawley returned to his friends and repeated this information.

"How perfectly sweet of them," cried the irresponsible bride. "Oh! Win, we must stay here and see them. Isn't it the dearest sleepy hollow of a place?"

Attended by the impressed and impressive clerk, they made an inspection of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Hawley settled upon a suite just over the main entrance. Mead was established across the hall. But Kate found a wonderful panorama which could only be seen from the rooms on the third floor, and there, down a dreary length of oil-clothed hall, she bestowed herself and her belongings.

"For I must," she explained to Patty, "I simply must get out of this veil and breathe, and I shouldn't dare to do it within reach of that horribly supercilious friend of Winthrop's. I'm going to plead headache or something, and have my dinner sent up here."

Mead, meanwhile, was unfolding similar plans to Hawley. "I should have joined you," said he, "if your wife's friend had been a little less self-sufficient and unsympathetic. Of course, I don't require any sympathy; but I don't want ridicule either. So, while she is of the party I'll have my meals in my room. I can't act the 'Man in the Iron Mask' forever. You just leave the ladies together after dinner and come up here for a pipe with me."

And when Mr. and Mrs. Hawley next encountered one another and reported the wishes of their friends, he suggested and she rapturously agreed, that they should dine in their horse-hair-covered sitting-room.

"I have a reason, dear," she told him, "for not wishing to go to the dining-room for our first meal together. I'll explain later."

"Your wishing it is enough," he answered before the conversation sank to banalities.

And when these several intentions were made clear to the conscientious clerk, he sent for the police force of the town—it consisted of a mild, little old man in a uniform and helmet which might have belonged to some mountainous member of the Broadway Squad in its prime—and implored him to spend the evening in the hall.

"They're beginning to act up funny already," the clerk imparted. "This eatin' all over the house don't seem just right to me. What do they think the dining-room's for anyway? Sam was up with the bag belonging to the single fellow, and he says he's got the worst looking pair of black eyes he ever saw. Here, Sam, you come and tell Jimmie what he looks like."

Sam, a middle-aged combination of porter, bellboy, furnace-man, office assistant and emergency barkeeper was but newly launched upon his description of Mead's face, when the chambermaid, who was also the waitress and housekeeper, broke in upon them with the intelligence that never in all her born days or nights had she seen anything like the face of the young lady on the third floor.

"What's the matter with her," said the clerk suspiciously, with a look which warned Jimmie to be at once a Bingham and a Sherlock Holmes.

"Why, Horace," she answered tragically, "that girl has two of the most awful black eyes. The whites of them is red and then comes purple and green and yellow. I guess they was meant to be blue."

This chromatic scale was too much for Jimmie. He reeled where he sat and then, the postman opportunely arriving, sent word to Mrs. Jimmie that duty would keep him from her all the night.

"Tell her," he huskily charged his messenger, "that there is suspicious circumstances going on in this house."

"You bet there is," the clerk agreed. "It looks like a case of attempted murder to me."

"Divorce, more likely," was Jimmie's professional opinion, but he had scant time to enlarge upon it before the waitress, outraged to the point of tears, broke out of her domain. She brought with her an atmosphere of long-dead beefsteak, chops and onions, and she shrilled for an answer to her question.

"What's the matter with 'em anyway? Ain't the dining-room good enough for 'em to eat in? It done all right for Judge Campbell's funeral this afternoon, and I found a real sweet wreath on that there whatnot in the corner. The candles wasn't all burnt up neither, an' I set out four of 'em on the four corners. It looks elegant, an' them tube-roses smells grand. An' when I told that young lady what's got the use of her eyes how glad I was they happened in when we was so well fixed for decorations, she looked awful funny. Most like she was cross-eyed."

"They all seem to have eye-trouble," Jimmie commented. "Do you suppose they're running away from one of these here blind asylums."

"Lunatic asylum, most likely," the cheerful clerk contributed.

When the other two guests ceased from traveling in molasses and sarsaparilla and returned to their quiet hostelry, all these surmises had hardened into certainties, and were imparted to them with a new maze of suspicion, more dense, more deadly, and more strictly in accordance with the principles laid down in "Dandy Dick, the Boy Detective."

Madeline, the waitress, reported further particulars as she ministered to the creature-comforts of the traveling gentlemen dining alone among the funeral-baked meats. So interested and excited did these gentlemen become that they determined to interview, or at least to see, their mysterious fellow guests.

When their elaborate supper had reached its apotheosis of stewed prunes and blue-boiled rice, Hawley and Mead had gone out for a meditative and tobacco-shrouded stroll. They passed through the hall and inspiration awoke in Jimmie.

"By gum," said he, "I know them now. I suspicioned them from the first by what Horace told me. But now I've got them sure. You mind that time I was down to New York and was showed over Police Headquarters, by professional etiquette?"

"Sure," they all agreed. It was indeed a reminiscence, the details of which had been playing havoc with Rapidan's nerves for the past fifteen years. They felt that they could not bear it now.

"Well," continued Jimmie, gathering his auditors close about him by the husky whisper he now adopted, "I see them two fellers then. Mebbe 'twas in the Rogue's Gallery and mebbe it was in the cells. I ain't worked it down that fine yet, but I'll think and pray on it and let you know when I get light."

When the staff and the commercial guests of the Empress Hotel were waiting to see illumination burst through the blue-shrouded protector, the bridal party was veering momentarily further from the normal. For the deserted bride, alone in the desolate best sitting-room, laid her head upon her arms and laughed and laughed. She had made one cautious descent to the ground floor in search of diversion, and meeting Jimmie, she found it. After a conversation strictly categorical upon his side and widely misleading upon hers, she had gone up stairs again and halted in the upper hall just long enough to hear Jimmie's triumphant:

"Well, we know her name anyway."

"What is it?" hissed Horace, while the porter relieved himself of a quid of tobacco so that nothing should interfere with his hearing and attention.

"Huh!" ejaculated Jimmie, "you bin a hotel clerk two years and sold seegars all that time (when you could) and you don't know Ruby Mandeville when she stands before you."

A box of the "Flor de" that gifted songstress, was soon produced and pried open, and the effulgent charms of its godmother compared with the less effulgent, but no less charming figure which had just trailed away.

"It's her, sure as you're born," cried the gentleman who traveled in molasses, absent-mindedly abstracting three cigars and conveying them surreptitiously to his coat pocket.

"She's fallen off some in flesh," commented Horace, as with careful presence of mind he drew out his daybook and entered a charge for those three cigars.

"But she don't fool me," said Jimmie, "she can put flesh on or she can take it off—"

"My, how you talk!" shrilled the chambermaid-bellboy, "you'd think you was talkin' about clothes."

"It ain't no different to them," Jimmie maintained. "That's one of the things us detekitives has got to watch out for."

"What do you s'pose she's doing here?" asked the porter.

"Gettin' married again most likely. That's about all she does nowadays."

Patty was still chuckling and choking over these remarks, when the door of the sitting-room opened cautiously and Kate Perry, swathed in her motor veil, looked in.

"Are we alone?" she demanded with proper melodramatic accent.

"We are," the bride answered, "Winthrop and Mr. Mead have gone out for a smoke."

"Then I want you to tell me if I'm fading at all. I've been looking at it upstairs, in a little two-by-three mirror, and taken that way, by inches, it looks awful. Tell me what you think?" She removed the veil and presented her damaged face for her friend's inspection. There was not much improvement to report, but the always optimistic Patty did what she could with it.

"The left cheek," she pronounced, "is really better, less swollen, less—Oh! Kate, here they come."

Miss Perry began to readjust her charitable gray chiffon veil. It was one of those which are built around a circular aperture, and as the steps in the hall came ever closer she, in one last frantic effort succeeded in framing the most lurid of her eyes in this opening. Casting one last look into the mirror, she swooped under the large center-table, dragging Patty with her, and disposing their various frills and ribbons under the long-hanging tablecover.

"If they don't find either of us," she whispered, "they'll go away to look for us."

She had no time to say more, and Patty had no time to say anything before the door opened and presented to their limited range of vision, two utterly strange pairs of shoes and the hems of alien trousers.

"I hope you will excuse me, Miss," began the molasses gentleman, so full of his entrance speech that he said the first part of it before he noticed that the room was empty. And then turned to rend his fellow adventurer, who was laughing at him.

"Didn't Horace tell us," he stormed, "that she was here, and wasn't you going to say how you had saw her in the original 'Black Crook?'"

"I seen her all right," said his more grammatical friend, with heavy emphasis.

"Do you see her now?" demanded the irate molasses traveler.

"I do not, but I'll set here 'til she comes."

They both sat. Not indeed until the arrival of Ruby Mandeville, but until Hawley and Mead made their appearance, and made it, too, very plain that they had not expected and did not enjoy the society of the travelers.

"Where are the ladies?" asked Hawley.

"Search us," responded the travelers.

"They must have gone to their rooms," said the bridegroom. "If these gentlemen don't object to our waiting here," he went on with a fine and wasted sarcasm.

"Set right down," said the genial sarsaparilla man, and to further promote good feeling he tendered his remaining "Ruby Mandeville" cigar.

"Your friend," said he affably, "does he always wear them goggles?"

"Always," answered Hawley. "Eats in them, sleeps in them."

"Born in them," supplemented Mead savagely.

They sat and waited for yet a few moments, and though Mead did not add geniality to the conversation, he certainly contributed interest to it. For his views on honeymoon etiquette being strong within him, and an audience made to his hand, he went on to amplify some of the theories with which he had been trying to undermine Winthrop's loyalty.

"I am persuaded that most of the disappointments of married life are due to the impossible standards set up at the beginning. Look at it this way. You know the fuss most wives make about the hours a husband keeps. Well! suppose Mr. Hawley comes out in the car with me to-night. I know some fellows who have a summer studio near here. We'll run over and make a night of it."

"Say," the molasses gentleman broke in, "be you married, mister?"

"No!" said Mead.

"Sounds like it," said the molasses gentleman. "Marriage will sort of straighten you out on these here subjects."

"Oh, leave 'em be," admonished the sarsaparilla man. "If I had 'a met up with him thirty years ago, mebbee I wouldn't be in the traveling line now. He's got a fine idee."

Hawley, meanwhile, was wrestling with his manners and the "Ruby Mandeville," until the lady, as was her custom, triumphed.

He hurriedly and incompletely extinguished the cigar, and attracted by the same opportunity for concealment which had appealed to Kate and Patty, he lifted a corner of the heavy-fringed tablecover and sent Ruby to join the other ladies.

Now, a lighted cigar applied suddenly to the ear of an excited and half-hysterical conspirator, will generally produce results. In this case it produced a scream, the bride, and after an interval, the shrouded confidential friend.

"See where amazement on your mother sits," the ghost remarks in Hamlet, but amazement never sat so hard on the wicked Gertrude of Denmark as it did upon the four men who saw the tablecloth give up its ghosts.

At first there was silence. One of those throbbing, abominable silences whose every second makes a situation worse and explanation more impossible.

The "Black Crook" speech of welcome and appreciation died in the heart of the molasses traveler. It did not somehow seem the safest answer to Hawley's threatening—

"I think you gentlemen had better explain how you happen to be in my private sitting-room. Perhaps we had better step out into the hall."

They did, and the echoes of their conversation brought Jimmie, that trusty sleuth, upon the scene. With him he brought Horace as witness. Also, he carried his dark lantern. He directed its glare fitfully at the two strangers until Mead, catching a beam in his eye, turned and drove Jimmie and his cohorts from the scene. They retreated in exceedingly bad order to the bar, and then Jimmie announced in sepulchral whispers that he had further identification to impart. He required much liquid refreshment to nerve him to speech, and his audience required to be similarly strengthened to hear.

"I've got 'em," he began, "I know 'em now. Horace, this is the biggest thing you'll ever be anywhere near." And, as his hearers drew close about him, he whispered "counterfeiters. The hull kit and bilin' of 'em."

Meanwhile, Kate and Patty wrestled afresh with the automobile veil, and had succeeded in getting it tied in a limp string around the bridesmaid's neck, leaving all her head and face uncovered. And when the groom and the groomsman returned she, with a muffled gurgle, dived back into the seclusion of the tablecover.

"We've got rid of those bounders," Hawley announced, and—

"Hello!" cried Mead, "Miss Perry gone already?"

"She was very tired," said Patty veraciously, but evasively.

"Awfully jolly girl, isn't she Mead?" said Hawley, with the expansiveness of the newly-wed. "Handsome, too?"

"Perhaps she is, but so long as she dresses like a veiled prophet it is hard to tell."

"If you two can get on without me," said Patty, disregarding a muffled protest from under the table, "I'll go up and fetch," she made these comforting words very clear, "my green motor veil."

Instantly, when he closed the door after her, Mead turned to Hawley.

"There's something wrong with this confounded mask," said he. "This strap-thing that goes round my head must be too tight. I've been mad with it the last half hour. How do I look?" he asked genially as he took it off, and proceeded to tamper with the buckles and elastic. "Howling Jupiter!" he cried a moment later, "I've busted it."

As the two friends stood and stared at one another aghast, they heard the click of Patty's returning heels, and Mead, abandoning dignity, courage—everything except the broken mask—dived into Miss Perry's maiden bower.

Mrs. Hawley watched this procedure with wide and fascinated eyes. No ripple shook the walls of the bower. No sound proceeded from it as the moments flew. Then Patty fell away into helpless laughter and wept tears of shocked and sudden mirth into the now useless motor veil.

"Patty!" remonstrated her husband, but she laughed helplessly on. "At least come out into the hall and laugh there," he urged, "the poor chap will hear you." And when he had followed her and listened to her shaken whisper, he broke into such a shout as forced the indignant and outraged Kate into a shudder of protest and disgust.

Instantly Mead threw an arm past the table's single central support and grasped a handful of silk chiffon and two fingers.

He, being of an acquisitive turn, retained the fingers. She being of a dictatorial turn, rebuked him.

"Finding is keeping," he shamelessly remarked. "Even in infancy I was taught that."

Now, a certain pomp of scene and circumstance is necessary to the sort of dignified snubbing with which Miss Perry was accustomed to treat possible admirers. Also, a serene consciousness of superlative good looks. But Kate Perry disfigured, cramped into a ridiculous hiding place, and suffering untold miseries of headache and throbbing eyes, was a very different creature.

And Mead, flippant, hard, and misanthropic in the state of nature, softened wonderfully as he sat in the gloom of the tablecover, in silent possession of those two slim fingers.

His words grew gentle, his manner kind, and her answers were calculated to petrify her long-suffering family if they could have overheard them.

"Mr. Mead," she said at last, "will you be so very kind as to stay here quietly under the table while I scramble out and go up to my room?"

No tongue of angel could have made a more welcome suggestion. Mead uttered feeble and polite proffers of escort, and silently called down blessings upon the head he had never seen. He had just allowed himself to be dissuaded from knight errantry, when the door opened and Jimmie flashed his dark lantern about the brightly lighted room. He then beckoned mysteriously to the still vigilant Horace, who lurked in the hall.

"Have you found them?" whispered that youth.

"Not a trace of them," answered Jimmie triumphantly. "They ain't gone out. They ain't in their rooms, and I'm studyin' how I can round 'em up. They're the most suspicious characters I ever see, Horace, and this night's work may cost us our lives."

This disposition of his existence did not seem to cheer Horace.

"Counterfeiters," Jimmie went on, "is the desperatest kind of criminals there is. Still we got to git 'em. I'll look round this room just so as nothing won't escape us, and then we'll go up to the next floor. It's good we got two of them located in the bridal suite."

Jimmie, with his prying dark lantern and his prodding nightstick, soon reached the space under the table, and the counterfeiters secreted there.

"I got 'em," he cried delightedly. "Hi, you. Come out of there and show yourselves."

They came. There was nothing else to do.

"Moses's holy aunt," cried Jimmie, falling back upon Horace, who promptly fell back upon the sofa.

"Here, you," said Mead. "You get out of this, both of you. Don't you know this is a private sitting-room?"

"No settin'-room," said Jimmie, recovering somewhat, "is private to them as sets under tables blackening one another's eyes."

"You ridiculous idiot," snorted Mead. "Do you dare to think that I hurt this lady?"

"Lady? Ain't she your wife?"

"She is not," snapped Kate.

"Then why did you hit her?" demanded Jimmie. "If she ain't your wife what did you want to hit her for? An' anyway, she'd ought to be. That's all I got to say."

The same idea occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Hawley, crouched guiltily against their door to hear their victims pass, for their amazed ears caught these words—the first were Kate's:

"You must let me give you some of my lotion."

And then came Mead's:

"I shall be most grateful. It must be hot stuff. You know you're hardly disfigured at all."

"The saints forgive him," Patty gurgled.

Later on in the darkness, Jimmie's idea visited Mead and was received with some cordiality. And at some time later still, it must have been presented to Miss Perry, for the misanthropic Mead—no longer misanthropic—now boasts a massive and handsome wife whom he calls his Little Kitty. But the idea was originally Jimmie's.

On the day before Christmas eve John Sedyard closed his desk, dismissed his two clerks and his stenographer two hours earlier than usual, and set out in quest of adventure and a present for his sister Edith. John Sedyard had a habit of succeeding in all he set forth to do but the complete and surprising success which attended him in this quest was a notch above even his high average.

Earlier in the month, his stenographer had secured the annual pledges of his affection for all the relatives, friends and dependants to whom he was in the habit of giving presents: all except his mother, his unmarried sister, Edith, who still lived at home, and his fiancée, Mary Van Plank. The gifts for these three, he had decided, must be of his own choice and purchase. He had provided for his mother and for Mary earlier in the week. Neither excitement nor adventure had attended upon the purchase of their gifts. Something for the house or the table was always the trick for elderly ladies who presided over large establishments and gave their whole souls to the managing of them. He bought for his mother a set of colonial silver candlesticks. For Mary, he bought a comb of gold—all gold, like her own lovely hair. The dark tortoise shell of the one she wore always seemed an incongruous note in her fair crown. But Edith was as yet unpresented, and it was on her account that Mr. Sedyard deserted his office and delighted his subordinates at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Edith was much more difficult than the other two had been. She was strong-minded, much given to churchwork and committees. Neither the home, as represented by the candlesticks, nor self-adornment as typified by the golden comb could be expected to appeal to her communistic, altruistic nature. And Sedyard, having experienced two inspirations, could think of nothing but combs and candlesticks. So he threw himself into the current, which swept along Broadway, trusting that some accident would suggest a suitable offering. Meanwhile, he revelled in the crowd, good-humored, holiday-making, holly-decked, which carried him uptown, past Wanamaker's and Grace Church, swirled him across old "dead man's curve," and down the Fourteenth Street side of Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of his kind:

"Buy a hat for your wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was twelve. It's a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, your maiden aunt—"

Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow's words, but his problem was solved. He would buy Edith something to look pretty in. She was a pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it. And she had been decent, John reflected, awfully decent about Mary. He knew that the entente cordiale which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary's living alone in a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was so much rescue work to be done in the world.

"I get my uplift," Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon her, "from the elevator. Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but help seeing the world from a very different angle."

Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.

During these meditations several articles of feminine apparel had come and gone under the hammer. The crowd had decreased somewhat and his position now commanded a clear view of the auctioneer's platform, and he realized that the fierce light of the arc lamps beat down upon as charming a costume as he had seen for many a day. All of corn-flower blue it was, a chiffon gown, a big chiffon muff and a plumed hat. Oh! if he had been allowed to do such shopping for Mary! how quickly he would have entered into the lists of bidders! Mary's eyes were just that heavenly shade of blue, but Mary's pride was as great as her poverty, and the time when he could shower his now useless wealth upon her was not yet. And then his loyal memory told him that Edith was blue-eyed like all the Sedyards and he knew that his sister's Christmas gifts stood before him. He failed, however, to discern in the bland presence of the lay figure, upon which they were disposed to such advantage, the companion of one of the most varied adventures in his long career.

The chiffon finery was rather too much for the Fourteenth Street audience. The bidding languished. The auctioneer's pleadings fell upon deaf ears. In vain his assistant, a deft-fingered man with a beard, twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the "semi-princesse back" and the "near-Empire front." Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much worn in Fourteenth Street. The auctioneer grew desperate. "Twenty-five dollars," he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made the bid wished herself at home and in bed. "Twenty-five dollars!"

"Throw in the girl, why don't you?" suggested a facetious youth, chiefly remarkable for a nose, a necktie and a diamond ring. "She's a peach all right, all right. She's got a smile that won't come off."

"All right, I'll throw her in," cried the desperate auctioneer. "What am I bid for this here afternoon costume complete with lady."

"Twenty-seven fifty," said a woman whom three years of banting would still have left too fat to get into it.

"Twenty-eight," whispered the first bidder.

"Thirty," said John Sedyard.

There was some other desultory bidding but in a few moments Sedyard found himself minus fifty-four dollars and plus a chiffon gown and muff, a hat all drooping plumes and a graceful female form, golden-haired, bewitching, with a smile sweetly blended of surprise, incipient idiocy and allure.

"She's a queen all right, all right," the sophisticated youth cheered him. "Git onto them lovely wax-like hands. Say, you know honest, on the level, she's worth the whole price of admission."

John, still chaperoned by this sagacious and helpful youth, made his way to the clerk's desk and proceeded to give his name and address and request that his purchases should be delivered in the morning.

"Deliver nothin'," said the clerk pleasantly. "Do you suppose we'd 'a let you have the goods at that price if we could 'a stored 'em overnight? Our lease is up," he continued consulting his Ingersoll watch, "in just fifteen minutes. In a quarter of an hour we hand over the keys and what's left of the fixtures to the landlord. He's let the store for to-morrow to a Christmas-tree ornaments merchant."

"Then I suppose I'll have to get an expressman. Where is the nearest, do you know?"

"Expressman!" exclaimed the sharp youth. "Well, I guess the nearest would be about Three Hundred and Fifty-second Street and then he'd have a load and a jag. No, sir, it's the faithful cab for yours. There's a row of cabs just on the edge of the square. I could go over and get you a hansom."

"Thank you," said John, "I wish you would." But a glance at his languishing companion made him add, "I guess you had better make it a four-wheeler. Hansom-riding would be pretty cold for a lady without a coat."

"All right," said the sharp youth. "You bring her out on the sidewalk and I'll get the hurry-up wagon. Say!" he halted to suggest, "you know what you'll look like, don't you?—riding around with that smile. When the lights flush you, you'll look just like a bridal party from Hoboken."

Leaving this word of comfort behind him, he proceeded to imperil his life among trolley cars and traffic, while John engaged the lady and urged her to motion.

He discovered that, supported at the waistline, she could be wheeled very nicely. He forced the muff over her upraised right hand, so that it somewhat concealed her face, and through an aisle respectfully cleared by the onlookers he led her to the open air. There he propped her against the show-window and turned in search of the cab and his new friend. In doing so he came face to face with an old one.

"Why, hello John!" said Frederick Trevor, a man who had an office in his building and an interest in his sister. "Who would have thought of meeting you here?"

"Or you," retorted John. "But since you are here, you can help me in a little difficulty."

"Not now, old chap," said Frederick, "I'm in a bit of a hurry. See you about it to-morrow. Well, so long. Don't let me keep you from your friend."

"Friend!" stormed John and then following the directions of Trevor's eyes, he descried a blue-clad, golden-haired young lady lolling against the window, trying with a giant chiffon muff to smother a fit of hilarious laughter. One arched and smiling eye showed above the muff and the whole figure was instinct with Bacchanalian mirth. "Why that's," he began to explain, but young Trevor had vanished into the crowd.

Presently the cab with the smart youth inside drew up to the curb and Sedyard, with a new self-consciousness, put his arm around the blue figure and trundled her across the sidewalk. The cabman threw his rug across his horse's quarters and lumbered down to assist at the embarkation of so fair a passenger. The smart youth held the door encouragingly open and John proceeded, with much more strength than he had expected to use, to heave the passenger aboard.

Even these preliminaries had attracted the nucleus of a crowd and the smart youth grew restive.

"Aw, say Maudie," he urged when the lady stuck rigid catty-cornerwise across the cab with her blue feathers pressed against the roof in one corner, and her bird-cage skirt arrangement protruding beyond the door-sill. "Aw, say Maudie, set down, why don't you, and take your Trilbys in. This gent is going to take you carriage riding."

"What's the matter with her anyway," demanded the cabman. "Don't she know how to set in a carriage?"

"No, she doesn't, she's only a wax figure," said John, "but I bought her and now I'm determined to take her home. She'd better go up on the box with you."

"What! her?" demanded the outraged Jehu. "Say, what do you take me for anyway? Do you suppose I ain't got no friends just 'cause I drive a cab? Why! I wouldn't drive up Broadway with them goo-goo eyes settin' beside me, not for nothing you could offer, I wouldn't."

By this time the crowd had reached very respectable proportions although there was nothing to see except the end of a blue gown hanging out of the cab's open door. The sharp youth, the cabman and John took turns in trying to adjust the lady to her environment. The rigidity and fragility of her arms and head made this very difficult, and presently there rolled upon the scene a policeman, large, Irish and chivalrous. It took Patrolman McDonogh but a second, but one glance at the tableaux and one whisper from the crowd to understand that a kidnapping atrocity was in progress.

With wrath in his eye, he shouldered aside Sedyard and the cabman, grabbed the smart youth, whose turn at persuasion was then on, and threw him into the face of the crowd.

"Oh! but you're the villyans," he admonished them, and then addressed the captive maid in reassuring tones.

"You're all right, Miss, now. You're no longer defenceless in this wicked city. The arrum of the law is around you," he cried, encircling her waist with that substantial member. "You're safe at last, come here to me out of that."

"Oh! noble, noble man," cried an emotional woman in the crowd. "If all officers were like you!"

Heartened by these words the noble, noble man exerted the arm of the law and plucked the maiden out of the cab amid great excitement and applause. But above the general murmur the shrill voice of the sharp youth rent the air:

"Fathead," he cried, "you've broke her neck. Can't you see how her head's goin' round and round?"

At this the emotional woman dropped to the sidewalk. "Lady fainted here, officer," cried a gentleman. But the noble, noble officer had no time for faints, and the lady was obliged to revive with only the assistance of the cold stones and curiosity.

For the shrill voice had spoken truth. Something had given away in Maudie's mysterious anatomy; the fair head, the changeless smile and the drooping plumes made three complete revolutions and nestled confidingly upon the shoulder of the Law.

"Here, none o' that," yelled Patrolman McDonogh quite reversing his earlier diagnosis of the situation. "None of your flim-flams, if you please. You go quiet and paceable with this gentleman. A little ride in the air is what you need."

"That's right, officer," Sedyard interrupted. "That's how to talk to her. I can't do a thing with her."

"Brute!" cried the emotional woman now happily restored. "It's officers like him that disgraces the force."

Patrolman McDonogh turned to identify this blasphemer and Maudie's head, deprived of its support, made another revolution and then dropped coyly to her left shoulder. She looked so unspeakable in that attitude that the cabman felt called upon to offer a little professional advice:

"She needs a checkrein," he declared, "an' she needs it bad," a remark which so incensed Patrolman McDonogh that Sedyard decided to explain:

"Just disperse those people, will you," said he, "I want to talk to you."

The sharp youth relieved the officer of law of his fair burden and posed her in a natural attitude of waiting beside the cab. McDonogh cleared the sidewalk and hearkened to Sedyard's tale.

"So you see," said John in conclusion, "what I'm up against. I really didn't want the dummy when I bought it and you can bet I'm tired of it now. What I wanted was the clothes, and I guess the thing for me to do is just to take them in the cab and leave the figure here."

"What!" thundered McDonogh. "You're going to leave a dummy without her clothes here on my beat? Not if I see ye first, ye ain't, and if ye try it on I'll run ye in."

"Say! I'll tell you what you want," piped up the still buoyant, smart youth. "You need one of them open taxicabs.

"He needs a hearse," corrected the disgruntled cabman. "Somethin' she can lay down in comfortable an' take in the sights through the windows."

"Now, he needs a taxi. He can leave her stand in the back all right, but I guess," he warned John, "you'll have to sit in with her and hold her head on."

And thus it was that Maudie left the scene. She left, too, the smart youth, the cabman and the noble, noble officer. And as the taxi bumped over the trolley tracks she, despite all Sedyard's efforts, turned her head and smiled out at them straight over her near-princesse back.

"Gee!" said the smart youth, "ain't she the friendliest bunch of calico."

"This case," said the noble Patrolman McDonogh with unpunctual inspiration, "had ought to be looked into by rights."

"Chauffeur," said John Sedyard to the shadowy form before him, "just pick out the darkest streets, will you?"

"Yes, sir," answered the chauffeur looking up into the bland smile and the outstretched hand above him. "I'll make it if I can but if we get stopped, don't blame me."

A year later, or so it seemed to John Sedyard, the taxicab, panting with indignation at the insults and interferences to which it had been subjected, turned into Sedyard's eminently respectable block and drew up before his eminently handsome house.

He paid and propitiated the chauffeur, took his lovely burden in his arms and staggered up the steps with the half regretful feeling of one who steps out of the country of adventure back to prosaic things. He found his latchkey, opened his door and drew Maudie into the hall. And on the landing half-way up the stairs stood his sister Edith, evidently the bearer of some pleasant tidings.

Maudie's smile flashed up at her from John's shoulder. Edith stared, stiffened, and retraced her steps. John wheeled the figure into the reception-room and thus addressed it:

"Listen to me, you dumbhead. You may think this adventure is over. Well, so did I, but I tell you now it's only just beginning. If you are not mighty careful you will be wrecking a home. So keep your mouth shut," he charged her, "and do nothing till you hear from me!"

Maudie smiled archly, coyly, confidentially, and he went upstairs.

In the sitting-room, he found gathered together his mother, his sister and Dick Van Plank, Mary's young brother and a student at Columbia. John was supported through Edith's first remark and the look with which she accompanied it by the memory of her goodness to Mary and by the anticipation of the fun which Maudie might be made to provide.

"I wish to say, John," she began, before any one else had time to speak, "that I've said nothing to mother or Dick, and I think it would be better if you didn't. I can attend to the case if you leave it to me."

"Like you," said John shortly. "Who told you she is a 'case.' Mother," he went on addressing that gentle knitter by the fire, "I want you to come downstairs."

"She shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Edith, and as Mrs. Sedyard looked interrogatively from one to another of her children, her daughter swept on. "John must be crazy, I saw him come in with a—a person—who never ought to be in a house like this."

"I'd like to know why not?" stormed John. "You don't know a thing about her. I don't know much for that matter, but when I came across her down on Union Square, just turned out of a shop where she had been working, mother, I made up my mind that I would bring her right straight home, and that Edith would be decent to her. You can see that Edith does not intend to be."

"But my dear boy," faltered Mrs. Sedyard, "was not that a very reckless thing to do? I know of an institution where you could send her."

"Oh! yes, yes," said John. "And I suppose I might have handed her over to a policeman," he added, thinking of his attempt in this direction, "but I didn't. The sight of her so gentle and uncomplaining in that awful situation at this time of general rejoicing was too much for me."

He felt this to be so fine a flight and its effect upon Dick was so remarkable, that he went on in a voice, as his mother always remembered, "that positively trembled at times."

"How was I, a man strong and well-dowered, to pass heartlessly by like the Good Samaritan—"

"There's something wrong with that," Dick interposed.

But John was not to be deflected. "What, mother, would you have thought of your son if he left that beautiful figure—for she is beautiful—"

"You don't say," said Dick.

"To be buffeted by the waves of 'dead man's curve?'"

"Oh, how awful!" murmured the old lady. "How perfectly dreadful."

It was at this point that Dick Van Plank unostentatiously left the room.

"But I didn't do it, mother," cried John, thumping his chest and anxious to make his full effect before the return of an enlightened and possibly enlightening Dick. "No, I thought of this big house, with only us three in it, and I said 'I'll bring her home.' Edith will love her. Edith will give her friendship, advice, guidance. She will even give her something to wear instead of the unsuitable things she has on. And what do I find?" He paused and looked around dramatically and warningly as Dick, with a beautified grin, returned. "Does Edith open her heart to her? No. Does Edith open her arms to her? No. All that Edith opens to her is the door which leads—who can tell where, whither?"

"I can tell," said Dick, "it leads right straight to my little diggings. If Edith throws her out, I'll take her in."

"Oh, noble, noble man," ejaculated John remembering the emotional woman, "but ah! that must not be. I took her hand in mine—by the way, did I tell you, she has beautiful little hands, not at all what I should have expected."

"You did not," said Dick. "And now that'll be about all from you. You're just about through."

"My opinion is," said Edith darkly, "that you are both either crazy or worse."

"Go down and see her for yourself," urged Dick, "so quiet, so reserved—hush! hark! she's coming up. Now be nice to her whatever you feel! I'll be taking her away in a minute or two."

But it was Mary Van Plank who came in. Mary, all blooming and glowing from the cold.

"Who's that in the reception-room?" she asked when the greetings were over and she was warming her slender hands before the fire. "She's the prettiest dear. She was standing at the window and she smiled so sweetly at me as I came up the steps."

John looked at Dick.

"Yes," admitted that unabashed delinquent, "I left her at the window when I came up."

"Alas! poor child," sighed John, looking out into the night. "She'll be there soon."

"What is she going out for at this time?" Mary demanded. "I quite thought that she, too, had come to dinner. Who is she, Mrs. Sedyard?"

Upon her mother's helpless silence, Edith broke in with the story as she felt she knew it. Union Square, the discharged shopgirl, John's quixotic conduct. And John watched Mary with a lover's eye. He had not intended that she should be involved. A moment of her displeasure, even upon mistaken grounds, was no part of his idea of a joke.

But there was no displeasure in Mary's lovely face.

"Why, of course, he brought her home," she echoed Edith's indignant peroration. "What else could he do?"

"Well, for one thing he could have taken her to the Margaret Louise Home, that branch of the Y.W.C.A., on Sixteenth Street, only a few blocks from where he found her."

"Oh! Edith," Mary remonstrated. "The Maggie Lou! And you know they would not admit her. Who would take a friendless girl to any sort of an institution at this season? John couldn't have done it! I think he's an old dear to bring her right straight home. Let's go down and talk to her. She must be wondering why we all leave her so long alone."

"No, you don't," said Dick. "Edith didn't tell you the whole story. The girl," and he drew himself up to a dignity based on John's, "is under my protection."

"Your protection!" repeated his amazed sister.

"Precisely. My protection. Edith declines to receive this helpless child. Therefore, I have offered her the shelter of my roof."

"His roof," explained Mary to Mrs. Sedyard, "is the floor of the hall bedroom above his. It measures about nine by six. So the thing to do, since of course, Dick is only talking nonsense, is to let me take the girl around to the studio until John and I can plan an uninstitutional future for her."

"You may do just as you please," said Edith coldly. "I have given my opinion as to what should be done with her. It has been considered, by persons more experienced than you, the opinion of an expert. Girls of her history and standards are not desirable inmates for well-ordered homes. I shall have nothing to do with her."

"How about it, Mary?" asked her brother. "Are you willing to risk her in the high-art atmosphere of the studio?"

"I'm glad to," Mary answered. "It's not often that one gets a chance of being a little useful, and doesn't the Christmas Carol say, 'Good will to men.' I'm going down to see her now."

"You're a darling," cried John. "True blue right through. Now, we'll all go down and arrange the transfer. But, first, I want to give Edith one more chance. Do you finally and unreservedly—"

"I do," said Edith promptly.

"And you, Mary, are you sure of yourself? Suppose that, when you see her, you change your mind?"

"I've given my word,", she answered. "I promise to take her."

"That's all I want," said John.

"How could you, John? How could you?" sobbed Edith. "How could you tell us—?"

"I told you nothing but the absolute truth. I meant her to be your Christmas present, but you have resigned her 'with all her works and all her pomps' to Mary."

"Ah! but if I refuse to take her from Edith?" Mary suggested.

"Then I get her," answered Dick blithely, "and she'd be safer with me. I know what you two girls are thinking of. You are going to borrow her clothes and make a Cinderella of her. They are what you care about. But I love her for herself, her useless hands, her golden hair, her lovely smile—well, no, I guess we'll cut out the smile," he corrected when Maudie, agitated by the appraising hands of the two girls, swung her head completely round and beamed impartially upon the whole assembly. "It don't look just sincere to me."

But there was no insincerity about Maudie. She was just as sweet-tempered as she looked. Uncomplainingly, she allowed herself to be despoiled of her finery and wrapped in a sheet while Mary wriggled ecstatically in the heavenly blue dress, pinned the plumed hat on her own bright head and threw the muff into a corner of the darkened drawing-room when she found that it interfered with the free expression of her gratitude to John.

And some months later when the trousseau was in progress, the once despised Christmas guest, now a member in good-standing of Mary's household, did tireless service, smilingly, in the sewing-room.

"Lemon, I think," said Miss Knowles, in defiance of the knowledge, born of many afternoons, that he preferred cream. She took a keen and mischievous pleasure in annoying this hot-tempered young man, and she generally succeeded. But to-day he was not to be diverted from the purpose which, at the very moment of his entrance, she had divined.

"Nothing, thank you," he answered. "I'll not have any tea. I came in only for a moment to tell you that I'm going to be married."

"Again?" she asked calmly, as though he had predicted a slight fall of snow. But her calm did not communicate itself to him.

"Again?" he repeated hotly. "What do you mean by 'again?'"

"Now, Jimmie," she remonstrated, as she settled herself more comfortably among her pillows and centered all her apparent attention upon a fragile cup and a small but troublesome sandwich, "don't be savage. I only mean that you always tell me so when you find an opportunity. That you even manufacture opportunities—some of them out of most unlikely material. A chance meeting in a cross-town car; an especially forte place in an opera; the moment when a bishop is saying grace or a host telling his favorite story. And yet you expect me to be surprised to hear it now! Here in my own deserted drawing-room with the fire lighted and the lamps turned low. You forget that one is allowed to remember."

"You allow yourself to forget when you choose and to remember when you wish: You are—"

"And to whom are you going to be married? To the same girl? Do you know, I think she is not worthy of you?"

"She is not," he acquiesced, and she, for a passing moment, seemed disconcerted. "Yet she is," he continued, cheered by this slight triumph, "the most persistent, industrious and deserving of all the young persons who, attracted by my great position and vast wealth, are pressing themselves or being pressed by designing relatives upon my notice."

His hostess laughed softly.

"Make allowances for them," she pleaded. "You know very few men can rival your advantages. The sixth son of a retired yet respectable stock broker, and an income of four thousand a year derived from a small but increasing—shall we say increasing—?"

"Diminishing; incredible as it may seem, diminishing."

"From a small but diminishing law practice. And with these you must mention your greatest charm."

"Which is?"

"Your humility, your modesty, your lack of self-assertiveness. Do you think she recognizes that? It is so difficult to fully appreciate your humility."

Jimmie grinned. "She's up to it," said he. "She knows all about it. She's as clever, as keen, as clear-sighted."

"Is she, perhaps, pleasing to the eye?" asked Miss Knowles idly. "Clever women are often so—well, so—"

Jimmie gazed at her across the little tea-table. He filled his eyes with her. And, since his heart was in his eyes, he filled that, too. After a moment he made solemn answer:

"She is the most beautiful woman God ever made."

"Ah, now," said Miss Knowles, returning her cup to its fellows and turning her face, and her mind, more entirely to him, "now we grow interesting. Describe her to me."

"Again?" Jimmie plagiarized.

"Yes, again. Tell me, what is she like?"

"She is like," he began so deliberately that his hostess, leaning forward, hung upon his words, "she is exactly like—nothing." The hostess sat back. "There was never anything in the least like her. To begin with, she is fair and young and slim. She is tall enough, and small enough and her eyes are gray and black and blue."

"She sounds disreputable, your paragon."

"And her eyes," he insisted, "are gray in the sunlight, blue in the lamplight, and black by the light of the moon."

"And in the firelight?"

He rose to kick the logs into a greater brightness; and when he had studied her glowing face until it glowed even more brightly, he answered:

"In the firelight they are—wonderful. She has—did I tell you?—the whitest and smallest of teeth."

"They're so much worn this year," she laughed, and wondered the while what evil instinct tempted her to play this dangerous game; why she could not refrain from peering into the deeper places of his nature to see if her image were still there and still supreme? Why should she, almost involuntarily, work to create and foster an emotion upon which she set no store, which indeed, only amused her in its milder manifestations and frightened her when it grew intense? He showed symptoms of unwelcome seriousness now, but she would have none of it.

"Go on," she urged. "Unless you give her a few more features she will be like little Red Riding Hood's grandmother."

"And she has," he proceeded obediently, "eyebrows and eyelashes—"

"One might have guessed them."

"—beyond the common, long and dark and soft. The rest of her face is the only possible setting for her eyes. It is perfection."

"And is she gentle, womanly, tender? Is she, I so often wonder, good enough to you?"

"She treats me hundreds of times better than I deserve."

"Doesn't she rather swindle you? Doesn't she let you squander your time?"—she glanced at the clock—"your substance?"—she bent to lay her cheek against the violets at her breast—"your affection upon her—?"

"And how could she be kinder? And when I marry her—"

"And if," Miss Knowles amended.

"There's no question about it," he retorted. "She knows that I shall marry her." Miss Knowles looked unconvinced. "She knows that she will marry me." Miss Knowles looked rebellious. "She knows that I shall never marry anyone else." Miss Knowles took that apparently for granted.

"Dear boy!" said she.

"That I have waited seven years for her."

"Poor boy!" said she.

"That I shall wait seven more for her."

"Silly boy!" said she.

"And so I stopped this afternoon to tell her that I'm coming home to marry her in two or three months."

"Coming home?" she questioned with not much interest. "Where are you going?"

"To Japan on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is living in a backwoods village there for his health—and his liberty. None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a very good one for me—but I tire you."

"No; oh, no," said Miss Knowles politely. "You are very interesting."

"Then you shouldn't fidget and yawn. You lay yourself open to misinterpretation. To continue: a very great chance for me. The firm is a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me to be heard of in connection with it."

"Some nasty scandal, of course."

"Not exactly. It is the Drewitt case. I wonder if you heard anything about it."

"For three months after the thing happened," she assured him with a flattering accession of interest, "I heard nothing about anything else. Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know. I heard that there was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement. And now you're going to interview the man! And you're going to Japan! Oh, the colossal luck of some people! You will write to me—won't you?—as soon as you see him, and tell me all about him. How he looks, what he says, how he justifies himself. O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely write to me?"

"Naturally," said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation; happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very unsatisfying but charming interlocutor. "I always do. Sometimes when your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of going away so that I might write to you. Perhaps I could write more convincingly than I can talk." A cheering condition of things for a lawyer, he reflected.

"But this is a different and much more particular thing," she insisted with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. "I have a sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a list of questions and you will answer them fully, won't you? Then I shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the Drewitt affair. When do you start?"

"To-morrow morning. I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then," doggedly, "then I'm coming home to be married. I came in to tell you."

"And if I don't quite believe you?"

"I shall postpone the ceremony. Shall we say indefinitely, some time in the summer?"

"Not even then. Never, I think. That troublesome girl is beginning—she feels that she ought to tell you—"

"That there is another 'another'?"

"Yes, I fear so."

"Who will be in town for the next three months?"

"Again, I fear so."

"Then that's all right," said the optimistic Jimmie. "There never was a man—save one, oh, lady mine—who could, for three months, avoid boring you. When he holds forth upon every subject under the sun and stars you will think longingly of me and of the endless variety of my one topic, 'I'm going to marry you.'"

"But if he should make it his?"

"I defy him to do it. There is no guise in which he could clothe the idea which would not remind you instantly of me. If he should be poetical: well, so was I when we were twenty-one. If he should give you gifts of great price: well, so did I in those Halcyon days when I had an allowance from my Governor and toiled not. If his is an outdoor wooing, you will inevitably remember that I taught you to ride, to skate, to drive, and to play golf. If he should attack you musically, you will be surprised at the number of operas we've heard together and of duets we've sung together. And so, in the words of my friend, fellow-sufferer, and name-sake, Mr. Yellowplush, 'You'll still remember Jeames.'"

"That's nonsense!" cried Miss Knowles. "I've tried to be fond of you—I am fond of you and accustomed to you. The fatal point is that I am accustomed to you. You say you never bore me. Well, you don't. And that other men do. Well, you're right. But people don't marry people simply because they don't bore each other."

"Your meaning is clearer than your words and much more correct. This really essential consideration is, alas, frequently not considered."

"People should marry," said Miss Knowles with a sort of consecrated earnestness—the most deadly of all the practiced phases of her coquetry—"for love. Now, I'm not in love with you. If I were, the very idea of your going away would make me miserable. And do I seem miserable? Am I lovelorn? Look at me carefully and tell the truth."

Jimmie obeyed, and the contemplation of his hostess seemed to depress him.

"No," he agreed gloomily, "you seem to bear up. No one, looking at your face, could guess that your heart was in—was in—" Jimmie halted, vainly searching for the poetical word. Miss Knowles supplied it.

"In torn and bleeding fragments," she supplemented. "No, Jimmie, I'm sorry. You've laid siege to it in every known way, and yet there's not a feather out of it."

"There are two ways," Jimmie pondered audibly, "in which I have not wooed you. One is à la cave dweller. I might knock you on the head with a knobby club and drag you to my lair. But since my lair is some blocks away, and since those blocks are studded with the interested public and the uninterested police, the cave dweller's method will not serve. There remains one other. I stand before you, so; I take your hand, so; I may even have to kiss it, so. And I say: 'Dear one, I want you. Every hour of my life I want you. I want you to take care of, to work for, to be proud of. I want you to let me teach you what life means. I want you for my dearest friend, for my everlasting sweetheart, for my wife.' And when I've said it, I kiss your hand, so; gently, once again, and wait for your answer."

"Dear boy," said she with an unsteady little laugh, for—as always—she shrank from his earnestness after she had deliberately roused it, "I wish you wouldn't talk like that. You make me feel so shallow-pated and so small. I don't want to talk about life and knowledge and love. And I don't want any husband at all. What makes you so tragic this afternoon? You're spoiling our last hour together. Come, be reasonable. Tell me what you think of Drewitt. Why do you suppose he did it? Did his wife and daughter know?"