e working day and
night with a double force, and their shipping department was pretty
nearly swamped with the strain put upon it. "Your royalty check on
January 1st will be the fattest in the land," wrote Waterbury in a
moment of enthusiasm. "We are thinking of sending our staff of readers
to the lunatic asylum and getting an entirely new set. An order for
four thousand has come in from Chicago this morning. St. Louis wants
fifteen hundred, and pretty nearly every other able-bodied town in the
country is asking for from one to one hundred and fifty." By Christmas
time, if the publishers' announcements were to be believed, "The City
of Credit" had attained to the enormous sale of three hundred and fifty
thousand, and Van Buren was in receipt of a letter from a literary
periodical asking for his photograph for publication in its February
issue. This brought him a realization of the fact that he might now
fairly claim to be considered a literary success. At any rate, he felt
that he had now a right to approach Miss Tooker with a fair prospect of
receiving from her a favorable answer to the question which she had a
year before left an open one.

And events showed that his feeling was justified, for two days later he
enjoyed the blissful sensation of finding himself the accepted lover of
the woman he had tried so hard to please.

"Is it to be--yes?" he whispered, as they sat together in the
conservatory of her father's city house.

"It has--always been--yes," she replied softly, and then what happened
is not for your eyes or mine. Suffice it to say that Van Buren moved
immediately from sordid old New York to become a dweller in the higher
altitudes of Elysium.

Incidentally the boom in "The City of Credit" stopped almost as
suddenly as it had begun. There was nobody apparently who felt called
upon to throw in the necessary number of dollars to sustain an already
over-stimulated market, which puzzled Messrs. Hutchins & Waterbury
exceedingly. They had hoped to live for the balance of their days upon
the profits of their World's Best Seller.

IV

As the spring approached and the day set for Miss Tooker's wedding to
Van Buren came nearer, the latter found himself daily becoming more and
more a prey to conscience. There was a decidedly large fly in the
amber of his happiness, for as he viewed the part he had played in the
forced success of "The City of Credit" he began to see it in its true
light. The first