r wealthy, he would never rest,
never be satisfied, never wring from life the last drop that life must
pay him, until this woman's love was his.

He loved her as such a man loves; he had no idea of letting that love
for her interfere with other ambitions.

Long ago, when very poor and very talented and very confident that the
world, which pretended to ignore him, really knew in its furtive heart
that it owed him fame and fortune and social position, he had determined
to begin the final campaign with a perfectly suitable marriage.

That was all years ago; and he had never swerved in his
determination--not even when Valerie West surprised his life in all the
freshness of her young beauty.

And, as he sat there leisurely over his claret, he reflected, easily,
that the time had come for the marriage, and that the woman he had
picked out was perfectly suitable, and that the suitable evening to
inform her was the present evening.

Mrs. Hind-Willet was prepossessing enough to interest him, clever enough
to stop gaps in a dinner table conversation, wealthy enough to permit
him a liberty of rejecting commissions, which he had never before dared
to exercise, and fashionable enough to carry for him what could not be
carried through his own presentable good looks and manners and fame.

This last winter he had become a frequenter of her house on Sixty-third
Street; and so carelessly assiduous, and so delightfully casual had
become his attentions to that beautifully groomed widow, that his
footing with her was already an intimacy, and his portrait of her, which
he had given her, had been the sensation of the loan exhibition at the
great Interborough Charity Bazaar.

He was neither apprehensive nor excited as he calmly finished his
claret. He was to drop in there after dinner to discuss with her several
candidates as architects for the New Idea Home.

So when he was entirely ready he took his hat and stick and departed in
a taxicab, pleasantly suffused with a gentle glow of anticipation. He
had waited many years for such an evening as this was to be. He was a
patient and unmoral man. He could wait longer for Valerie,--and for the
first secret blow at the happiness and threatened artistic success of
Louis Neville.

So he rolled away in his taxi very comfortably, savouring his cigarette,
indolently assured of his reception in a house which it would suit him
perfectly to inhabit when he cared to.

Only one thing worried him a