ssented, laughing, "unless she hurries up and gets
married. That was our agreement, Lady Pat--as long as Alice is free, we
can't make any plans for ourselves."

"Wouldn't it be grand to have you storm the castle and carry me off!"
Patricia was quite taken by the idea. "Anyhow, next to Alice, you love
me best, don't you, Sir Launcelot?"

"I certainly do," Allen said, truthfully. "Now, you'll go home with
Riley and wait to see what happens, won't you?"

"All right," the child said, entirely satisfied. "Gee, but I wish Mr.
Covington would hurry up!"

Patricia rose obediently and took Riley's hand, as they left the room.

"Wit ye well," she said as she bade Allen good-bye at the elevator. "I
shall wait at the window with a silken ladder every night until you
come."

Allen turned slowly back into his room, closed the door, and sat down
alone on the window-seat which had so recently also sustained his
animated little companion. Not until now had the full force of the
wrench come upon him, and he was conscious of a lump in his throat as he
thought of Alice, first always, then of Mr. Gorham, and last of the city
itself. During the months since he had accidentally met Alice in
Washington, there had never been a wavering of his purpose. She was the
one girl to him among the many he met during the social rounds into
which he had plunged while living in New York. He had been undaunted by
her attitude, undismayed by the seeming hopelessness of it all--but now
her very sympathy proved to him the necessity of at last giving up the
one great hope upon which he had set his heart. The pain at separating
from his chief, while of a different nature, was no less keen. Mr.
Gorham still stood to Allen as the epitome of the best that a man could
express. The shock which had come to him when Gorham admitted a
knowledge of Covington's investment of Alice's money, did not weaken his
respect for the man, but rather was the final event to convince him that
his own conception of business must be entirely wrong. If Mr. Gorham
sanctioned it, then it was right, it could be nothing else; but all his
efforts, conscientious as he knew them to have been, to master the
intricacies of the code his preceptor had tried to teach him, had
accomplished nothing.

And the great city, which contained so many of his classmates and
friends, who had made him welcome in their homes, must in the future
receive him only as a stranger. He loved the individuality of