thinking of
himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for
wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous
tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to
affect cordiality.

One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned
as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his
comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with
a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the
doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo
and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who
moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and
shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no
names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one
had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which
applied to both.

Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of
some entertainment--and below that:

"A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is
whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of
domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society
antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one
untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a
diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can
flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the
parallel."

Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.

"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you
think you're going in such hot haste?"

Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a
stern line.

"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never
slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of
treatment from others."

"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That
little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are
the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are
not, my son. Believe me, they are not."

"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."

"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile
and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around
waiting t