nd dug
him in the ribs with his thumb.

Mr. Pawling's mouth sagged and his melancholy eyes shifted around him
from Tessa Barclay--who was now attempting to balance a bon-bon on her
nose and catch it between her lips--to Vanna Brown, teaching Miss West
to turn cart-wheels on one hand.

Evidently Art had its consolations; and the single track genius who
lived for art alone got a bonus, too. Also, what General Sherman once
said about Art seemed to be only too obvious.

A detail, however, worried Mr. Pawling. Financially, he had always
been afraid of Jews. And the nose of Angelo Puma made him uneasy every
time he looked at it.

But an inch is a mile on a man's nose; and his own was bigger, yet
entirely Yankee; so he had about concluded that there was no racial
occasion for financial alarm.

What he should have known was that no Jew can compete with a
Connecticut Yankee; but that any half-cast Armenian is master of both.
Especially when born in Mexico of a Levantine father.

Now, in spite of Angelo Puma's agile gaiety and exotic exuberances,
his brain remained entirely occupied with two matters. One of these
concerned the possibility of interesting Mr. Pawling in a plot of
ground on Broadway, now defaced by several taxpayers.

The other matter which fitfully preoccupied him was his unpleasant and
unintentional interview with Sondheim.

For it had come to a point, now, that the perpetual bullying of former
associates was worrying Mr. Puma a great deal in his steadily
increasing prosperity.

The war was over. Besides, long ago he had prudently broken both his
pledged word and his dangerous connections in Mexico, and had started
what he believed to be a safe and legitimate career in New York,
entirely free from perilous affiliations.

Government had investigated his activities; Government had found
nothing for which to order his internment as an enemy alien.

It had been a close call. Puma realised that. But he had also realised
that there was no law in Mexico ten miles outside of Mexico City;--no
longer any German power there, either;--when he severed all
connections with those who had sent him into the United States
camouflaged as a cinema promoter, and under instruction to do all the
damage he could to everything American.

But he had not counted on renewing his acquaintance with Karl Kastner
and Max Sondheim in New York. Nor did they reveal themselves to him
until he had become too prosperous to denounce the