t the check of something intangible but real; and the vanity
in him, flicked on the raw, peered out at her from his close-set eyes.
For a moment he measured her from the edge of her skirt to her golden
head, insolently.

"You might remind your husband," he said, "that I'd rather like to have
a card to the Orchil affair."

"There is no use in speaking to George," she replied regretfully,
shaking her head.

"Try it," returned Neergard with the hint of a snarl; and he took his
leave, and his hat from the man in waiting, who looked after him with
the slightest twitching of his shaven upper lip. For the lifting of an
eyebrow in the drawing-rooms becomes warrant for a tip that runs very
swiftly below stairs.

That afternoon, alone in his office, Neergard remembered Gerald. And for
the first time he understood the mistake of making an enemy out of what
he had known only as a friendly fool.

But it was a detail, after all--merely a slight error in assuming too
early an arrogance he could have afforded to wait for. He had waited a
long, long while for some things.

As for Fane, he had him locked up with his short account. No doubt he'd
hear from the Orchils through the Fanes. However, to clinch the matter,
he thought he might as well stop in to see Ruthven. A plain word or two
to Ruthven indicating his own wishes--perhaps outlining his policy
concerning the future house of Neergard--might as well be delivered now
as later.

So that afternoon he took a hansom at Broad and Wall streets and rolled
smoothly uptown, not seriously concerned, but willing to have a brief
understanding with Ruthven on one or two subjects.

As his cab drove up to the intricately ornamental little house of gray
stone, a big touring limousine wheeled out from the curb, and he caught
sight of Sanxon Orchil and Phoenix Mottly inside, evidently just leaving
Ruthven.

His smiling and very cordial bow was returned coolly by Orchil, and
apparently not observed at all by Mottly. He sat a second in his cab,
motionless, the obsequious smile still stencilled on his flushed face;
then the flush darkened; he got out of his cab and, bidding the man
wait, rang at the house of Ruthven.

Admitted, it was a long while before he was asked to mount the carved
stairway of stone. And when he did, on every step, hand on the bronze
rail, he had the same curious sense of occult resistance to his physical
progress; the same instinct of a new element arising into the sc