panions; they made much of him; involved
him in gay talk; smoothed him down, patted him on the head, found his
self-esteem for him, and handed it over in its pristine vigor. Before he
had sat half an hour at the merry table, he could look back at his
profound depression of the morning with smiling wonder. Where in the
world had he gotten his terrible grouch? Not a thing in the world had
happened, except that the mayoralty was not going to be handed to him on
a large silver platter. Was that such a fearful loss after all? On the
contrary, was it not rather a good riddance? Being Mayor, in all human
probability, would be a horrible bore.

It was a mild, azure, zephyrous day; spring at her brightest and best.
West, descending the club steps, sniffed the fragrant air
affectionately, and was hanged if he would go near the office on such an
afternoon. Let the _Post_ readers plod along to-morrow with an editorial
page both skimpy and inferior; anything he gave them would still be too
good for them, middle-class drabs and dullards that they were.

The big red automobile was old now, and needed paint, but it still ran
staunch and true; and Miss Avery had a face, a form, and a sinuous
graceful manner, had veils and hats and sinuous graceful coats, that
would have glorified a far less worthy vehicle. And she drove divinely.
By invitation she took the wheel that afternoon, and with sure, clever
hands whipped the docile leviathan over the hills and far away.

The world knows how fate uses her own instruments in her own way,
frequently selecting far stranger ones than the delightful and wealthy
Miss Avery. Now for more than a year this accomplished girl had been
thinking that if Charles Gardiner West had anything to say to her, it
was high time that he should say it. If she had not set herself to find
out what was hobbling the tongue of the man she wanted, she would have
been less than a woman; and Miss Avery was a good deal more. Hence, when
she had seen West with Sharlee Weyland, and in particular on the last
two or three times she had seen West with Sharlee Weyland, she had
watched his manner toward that lady with profound misgivings, of the
sort which starts every true woman to fighting for her own.

Now Miss Avery had a weapon, in the shape of valuable knowledge, or, at
any rate, a valuable suspicion that had lately reached her: the
suspicion, in short, which had somehow crept abroad as suspicions will,
that West had done a c