were worn assiduously and credit was strained to buy
new ones. The flat was adorned with fresh flowers and several new yellow
and pale blue cushions appeared at the little teas, which began to
assume a more festive air. Desirable people, who went ordinarily to
the teas at long intervals and through reluctant weakness, or sometimes
rebellious amiability, were drummed up and brought firmly to the fore.
Milly herself began to look pink and fluffy through mere hopeful
good spirits. Her thin little laugh was heard incessantly, and people
amusedly if they were good-tempered, derisively if they were spiteful,
wondered if it really would come to something. But it did not. The
young foreigner suddenly left New York, making his adieus with entire
lightness. There was the end of it. He had heard something about lack
of income and uncertainty of credit, which had suggested to him that
discretion was the better part of valour. He married later a young lady
in the West, whose father was a solid person.

Less astute young women, under the circumstances, would have allowed
themselves a week or so of headache or influenza, but Milly did not. She
made calls in the new frocks, and with such persistent spirit that she
fished forth from the depths of indifferent hospitality two or three
excellent invitations. She wore her freshest pink frock, and an
amazingly clever little Parisian diamond crescent in her hair, at the
huge Monson ball at Delmonico's, and it was recorded that it was on that
glittering occasion that her "Uncle James" was first brought upon the
scene. He was only mentioned lightly at first. It was to Milly's credit
that he was not made too much of. He was casually touched upon as a very
rich uncle, who lived in Dakota, and had actually lived there since his
youth, letting his few relations know nothing of him. He had been rather
a black sheep as a boy, but Milly's mother had liked him, and, when he
had run away from New York, he had told her what he was going to do, and
had kissed her when she cried, and had taken her daguerreotype with him.
Now he had written, and it turned out that he was enormously rich,
and was interested in Milly. From that time Uncle James formed an
atmosphere. He did not appear in New York, but Milly spent the next
season in London, and the Monsons, being at Hurlingham one day, had
her pointed out to them as a new American girl, who was the idol of a
millionaire uncle. She was not living in an ultra fas