ing than mines and making your daily bread. It's worth
paying out to be in on it,--for a fellow like me. And when it's
Thea--Oh, I back her!" he laughed aloud as he burst in at the door of
the Athletic Club, powdered with snow.

Archie sat down before the New York papers and ran over the
advertisements of hotels, but he was too restless to read. Probably he
had better get a new overcoat, and he was not sure about the shape of
his collars. "I don't want to look different to her from everybody else
there," he mused. "I guess I'll go down and have Van look me over. He'll
put me right."

So he plunged out into the snow again and started for his tailor's. When
he passed a florist's shop he stopped and looked in at the window,
smiling; how naturally pleasant things recalled one another. At the
tailor's he kept whistling, "Flow gently, Sweet Afton," while Van Dusen
advised him, until that resourceful tailor and haberdasher exclaimed,
"You must have a date back there, doctor; you behave like a bridegroom,"
and made him remember that he wasn't one.

Before he let him go, Van put his finger on the Masonic pin in his
client's lapel. "Mustn't wear that, doctor. Very bad form back there."

II

FRED OTTENBURG, smartly dressed for the afternoon, with a long black
coat and gaiters was sitting in the dusty parlor of the Everett House.
His manner was not in accord with his personal freshness, the good lines
of his clothes, and the shining smoothness of his hair. His attitude was
one of deep dejection, and his face, though it had the cool,
unimpeachable fairness possible only to a very blond young man, was by
no means happy. A page shuffled into the room and looked about. When he
made out the dark figure in a shadowy corner, tracing over the carpet
pattern with a cane, he droned, "The lady says you can come up, sir."

Fred picked up his hat and gloves and followed the creature, who seemed
an aged boy in uniform, through dark corridors that smelled of old
carpets. The page knocked at the door of Thea's sitting-room, and then
wandered away. Thea came to the door with a telegram in her hand. She
asked Ottenburg to come in and pointed to one of the clumsy,
sullen-looking chairs that were as thick as they were high. The room was
brown with time, dark in spite of two windows that opened on Union
Square, with dull curtains and carpet, and heavy, respectable-looking
furniture in somber colors. The place was saved from utter dismalness