That morning those were the questions on the lips of every
man in London save one. He was Sam Lowell; and he was asking himself
another and more personal question: "How can I find five pounds and
pacify Mrs. Wroxton?"

He had friends in New York who would cable him money to pay his passage
home; but he did not want to go home. He preferred to starve in London
than be vulgarly rich anywhere else. That was not because he loved
London, but because above everything in life he loved Polly Seward--and
Polly Seward was in London. He had begun to love her on class day of
his senior year; and, after his father died and left him with no one
else to care for, every day he had loved her more.

Until a month before he had been in the office of Wetmore & Hastings, a
smart brokers' firm in Wall Street. He had obtained the position not
because he was of any use to Wetmore & Hastings, but because the firm
was the one through which his father had gambled the money that would
otherwise have gone to Sam. In giving Sam a job the firm thought it
was making restitution. Sam thought it was making the punishment fit
the crime; for he knew nothing of the ways of Wall Street, and having
to learn them bored him extremely. He wanted to write stories for the
magazines. He wanted to bind them in a book and dedicate them to
Polly. And in this wish editors humored him--but not so many editors
or with such enthusiasm as to warrant his turning his back on Wall
Street.

That he did later when, after a tour of the world that had begun from
the San Francisco side, Polly Seward and her mother and Senator Seward
reached Naples. There Senator Seward bought old Italian furniture for
his office on the twenty-fifth floor of the perfectly new Seward
building. Mrs. Seward tried to buy for Polly a prince nearly as old as
the furniture, and Polly bought picture post-cards which she sent to
Sam.

Polly had been absent six months, and Sam's endurance had been so timed
as just to last out the half-year. It was not guaranteed to withstand
any change of schedule, and the two months' delay in Italy broke his
heart. It could not run overtime on a starvation diet of post-cards;
so when he received a cable reading, "Address London, Claridge's," his
heart told him it could no longer wait--and he resigned his position
and sailed.

On her trip round the world Polly had learned many things. She was
observant, alert, intent on asking questions, hungering for f