ightly. She's my one and only mother."

"She--you mean--her son! Well I'll be darned!" He held out his
hand to Jock. "If you're a real son of your mother I wish you'd
just call the office boy as you step down the hall with Von Herman
and tell him to bring me a hammer and a couple of spikes. I'd
better nail down my desk."

"I'll promise not to crowd you for a year or two," grinned Jock
from the doorway, and was off with the pleased Von Herman.

Past the double row of beehives again, into the elevator, out
again, up a narrow iron stairway, into a busy, cluttered,
skylighted room. Pictures, posters, photographs hung all about.
Some of the pictures Jock recognized as old friends that had gazed
familiarly at him from subway trains and street cars and theater
programmes. Golf clubs, tennis rackets, walking sticks, billiard
cues were stacked up in corners. And yet there was a bare and
orderly look about the place. Two silent, shirt-sleeved men were
busy at drawing boards. Through a doorway beyond Jock could see
others similarly engaged in the next room. On a platform in one
corner of the room posed a young man in one of those costumes the
coat of which is a mongrel mixture of cutaway and sack. You see
them worn by clergymen with unsecular ideas in dress, and by the
leader of the counterfeiters' gang in the moving pictures. The
pose was that met with in the backs of magazines--the head lifted,
eyes fixed on an interesting object unseen, one arm crooked to
hold a cane, one foot advanced, the other trailing slightly to
give a Fifth Avenue four o'clock air. His face was expressionless.
On his head was a sadly unironed silk hat.

Von Herman glanced at the drawing tacked to the board of one of
the men. "That'll do, Flynn," he said to the model. He glanced
again at the drawing. "Bring out the hat a little more, Mack. They
won't burnish it if you don't,"--to the artist. Then, turning
about, "Where's that girl?"

From a far corner, sheltered by long green curtains, stepped a
graceful almost childishly slim figure in a bronze-green Norfolk
suit and close-fitting hat from beneath which curled a fluff of
bright golden hair. Von Herman stared at her.

"You're not the girl," he said. "You won't do."

"You sent for me," retorted the girl. "I'm Miss Michelin--Gelda
Michelin. I posed for you six months ago, but I've been out of
town with the show since then."

Von Herman, frowning, opened a table drawer, pulled out a card
index, ra