ctually, only on the eve of his mission, he sold
a Runaway car to a fat merchant prince who dined opposite to him; or
at least he went as near to the actual selling as it was possible to
go in the circumstances. He recommended him to their Liverpool agent,
wrote a personal letter, gave his card and received one in return, and
parted from his probable client with a feeling that the transaction
was going through.

He was off at daybreak next morning.

A stupendous piece of luck befell him on board. They were only two
days out when he found that a well-known theatrical management was
taking a play, with the entire London cast, to New York. It was only
on the second day, when, looking across the dining saloon, he saw a
raven head on the top of a rather full neck and high shoulders, and
met the gay and luring glance which he had met once before, to his
secret thrill, across the Royal Red, on the night when he dined there
with his wife to celebrate her birthday.

Osborn was a free man; he had broken routine and was out adventuring;
and he was goodlooking, he looked worth while. She was a rather stupid
actress, with no magnetism but her looks, and no possible chance of
ever in this world obtaining a bigger part than the minor one she at
present had inveigled from the manager; and she liked well-set-up
smart men, men who appeared as if they had money to burn. There were
no obstacles placed in Osborn's way.

He was highly elated when the end of a week found him calling her
familiarly "Roselle," when he could walk the deck with her after
breakfast, and join her party for bridge in the afternoons, and
withdraw to a warm corner of the saloon with her after dinner, there
to become better acquainted. He was at last, he said to himself,
loosening those domestic chains which had hobbled him, and was doing
more as other men did.

She gulled him into thinking her clever; all she said and did and
looked excited him; she was so different from the women whom men of
his class married and with whom only they became intimate; a fellow on
two hundred a year with a wife and family could not afford the society
of the stage. But a fellow with three hundred a year and any
commission his smartness could make, all just for mere pocket-money,
was in a different boat altogether. The sums he staked at bridge with
Roselle and her party on those winter afternoons in mid-Atlantic used
to keep the household at No. 30, Welham Mansions for a week. Somet