saddle. "Permit me to present to you the boy
Croesus--the only one extant. His marbles are plunks and his kites are
made of fifty-dollar notes. He feeds upon coupons a la Newburgh, and
his champagne is liquid golden eagles. Look at him, gentlemen, while
you can, and watch him while he spends thirteen thousand dollars for
flowers!"

"With a Viennese orchestra for twenty-nine thousand!" added Bragdon.
"And yet they maintain that silence is golden."

"And three singers to divide twelve thousand among themselves! That's
absolutely criminal," cried Van Winkle. "Over in Germany they'd sing a
month for half that amount."

"Six hundred guests to feed--total cost of not less than forty thousand
dollars," groaned "Nopper," dolefully.

"And there aren't six hundred in town," lamented "Subway" Smith. "All
that glory wasted on two hundred rank outsiders."

"You men are borrowing a lot of trouble," yawned Brewster, with a
gallant effort to seem bored. "All I ask of you is to come to the party
and put up a good imitation of having the time of your life. Between
you and me I'd rather be caught at Huyler's drinking ice cream soda
than giving this thing. But--"

"That's what we want to know, but what?" and "Subway" leaned forward
eagerly.

"But," continued Monty, "I'm in for it now, and it is going to be a
ball that is a ball."

Nevertheless the optimistic Brewster could not find the courage to tell
Peggy of these picturesque extravagances. To satisfy her curiosity he
blandly informed her that he was getting off much more cheaply than he
had expected. He laughingly denounced as untrue the stories that had
come to her from outside sources. And before his convincing assertions
that reports were ridiculously exaggerated, the troubled expression in
the girl's eyes disappeared.

"I must seem a fool," groaned Monty, as he left the house after one of
these explanatory trials, "but what will she think of me toward the end
of the year when I am really in harness?" He found it hard to control
the desire to be straight with Peggy and tell her the story of his mad
race in pursuit of poverty.

Preparations for the ball went on steadily, and in a dull winter it had
its color value for society. It was to be a Spanish costume-ball, and
at many tea-tables the talk of it was a god-send. Sarcastic as it
frequently was on the question of Monty's extravagance, there was a
splendor about the Aladdin-like entertainment which had a charm.
Beneath