I pass."

He returned a moment later to find her still standing by the window. At
last she turned back to the room and took up her hat. She lifted it to
her head as though it were very heavy, and her arms very tired.

"I guess, Bobby, I'll be running along," she announced.

"Grace," he said earnestly, "it's good to know that from this time on
you are a star."

She laughed.

"Yes, isn't it?" she answered. "I'm a real ash-trash now. No--don't
bother to see me down. Mr. Deprayne will put me into the taxi'."

Outside the threshold she paused to thrust her head back into the room,
and to laugh gaily as she shouted in the slang of the street:

"Oh, you Galahad!"

But her eyes were swimming with tears.

As I climbed the creaking stairs again, I was pondering the question of
contentment. Here were three of us. One had raked success out of the
fire of failure and had written what promised to be the season's
dramatic sensation. One had earned the right to read her name, nightly,
in Broadway's incandescent roster. I myself had been preserved from
cannibal flesh-pots. All of us were seemingly brands snatched from the
burning, and all of us were deeply miserable. I wondered if the fourth
was happy; the woman who had once said to Maxwell the things he now
vainly longed to hear? And She--the lady I had never seen; what of her?

I found the author gazing off with a far-away reminiscence which was
mostly pain. The taxi' was whirring under the arch, but he had already
forgotten it and its occupant.

"Do you want to unbosom yourself, Bobby?" I questioned.

He shook his head.

"To you?" he inquired with a smile. "You're a woman-hater."

But a moment later he came over and laid his hand affectionately on my
shoulder, fearing he had offended me.

"I guess, old man," he explained, "there's no balm in post-mortems. I
loved her, that's all, and I still do."

"She married?" I inquired.

"She is now Mrs. William Clay Weighborne of Lexington. It's a prettier
name than Fanny Maxwell, and looks better on a check. I was number
three, that's all."

"Mrs. Who?" I repeated, in astonishment. "You don't mean the wife of W.
C. Weighborne?"

"Why?" he asked suddenly. "Is the gentleman an acquaintance of yours?"

"Since this morning, yes. He is even a business associate."

"How you birds of a financial feather do flock around the same pabulum,"
he coolly observed.

"I was rather well impressed with him," I admitted idiotically eno