here you are--take it."

Bojo took it quite stupidly, saying:

"Thank you, thank you, sir!"

Drake watched the young man's emotion with tolerant amusement.

"Don't wonder you're a bit shaken up, Tom. Supposing you call up a
certain young lady on long distance. Rather please her, I reckon."

"Why, yes. I wanted to do it. I--I will, of course."

"So you thought I was going to sell short Pittsburgh & New Orleans,"
said Drake with a roguish humor.

Bojo nodded, at loss for words, biding the moment to escape into the
outer air.

"But, of course, Tom," said Drake slowly, with smiling eyes, "_you_
didn't tell any one, did you?"

Bojo mumbled something incoherent and went out, clutching the check,
which lay in his hand with the heaviness of lead.

In the open air he tried to readjust the events of the night. He had a
confused idea of rushing through the great hall, past the mechanical
footman, of hearing Thompson cry, "Get you a taxi, sir!" and of being
far down resounding pavements in the lovely night with something still
clutched in his hand.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand," he said to himself. He repeated it
again and again as a sort of dull drum-beat accompaniment, resounding in
his ears, even as his cane tapped out its sharp metallic punctuation.

"Two hundred _and_ fifty!" he said for the hundredth time, utterly
unable to comprehend what had in one hour changed the face of his world.
He stopped, drew his hand from his pocket, took the crumpled check and
placed it in his wallet, buttoned his coat carefully, and then
unbuttoned it to make sure it had not slipped from his pocket.

Drake had not asked him the vital question. He had not had to answer
him, to tell him what he had lost, to own that he had gambled beyond his
right. The issue he had gone to meet, resolved on a clean confession,
had been evaded, and in his pocket was the check--a fortune! Certain
facts did not at once focus in his mind, perhaps because he did not want
to contemplate them, perhaps because he was too bewildered with his own
sensations to perceive clearly what a role he had been made to play.

But as he swung down the Avenue past the Plaza with its Argus-eyed
windows still awake, past a few great mansions with cars and grouped
footmen in wait for revelers, at the thought of the quiet Court, of
Roscoe and Granning, at the sudden startled recollection of DeLancy, the
cold fact forced itself upon him; they had lost and he had won. He ha