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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
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