ry well. I will come and see you
again."

As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed to open his
eyes.

"Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel," he said. "Thank you, ma'am." And as his
eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace: "Well, if that's
her--she can have ME--and welcome!"

*****

She came to see him again each day--sometimes in a linen frock and
garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or
after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening,
with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies--looking like
the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his
having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in
the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through
any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see
the show and get "a look-in" at the Four Hundred. He believed very
implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately--though perhaps almost
unconsciously--cherished the distinction his share of them conferred
upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type
cherishes his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel in
his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells
fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his
multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated
sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and
savourless thing.

Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he
was lying in a room in the same house with her. And she coming in to see
him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The
comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into
insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady
Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with
her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as "Master Ughtred."
"Master" was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon
the small sons of baronets and the like. The children he knew in New
York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill. No
parallel to "Master" had been in vogue among them.

Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little thing, and
both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking of New York. She had
not been home for years, and the youngster had nev