rt. I may never see your coming picture;
you may never see mine again. But I cannot lose you from my life.
It seemed, Fraeulein Irma," he said, earnestly, "when I first met
the glance of your dreaming eyes, that I had known you in some
other world."

"I receive no one; I am a recluse," murmured Irma, with eyes
smiling through down dropped lashes; "but, if you care, you may
come, a week from to-day, and breakfast with me here! Dear old
Raffoni will play propriety. As for the singing, I am pledged to
be mute, parole d'honneur. But you must be in my first audience.
I must keep an artist's faith with my manager."

"I shall have the loge d'honneur at your debut," enthusiastically
cried Clayton, as he lingered over her frankly extended hand after
murmuring his acceptance.

The woman who sat, with her head bowed upon her hands, listened to
his receding footsteps. "Il Regalantuomo," she murmured. "It is a
pity, too! What does Fritz want of him?"

Then gliding serpent-like from the darkened corridor, she joined
the waiting woman in the carriage below, a woman whose form was
but dimly defined beyond the half-lowered silken curtain of the
carriage as Randall Clayton sped along to his money mill.

Some indefinable impulse kept Clayton from speaking of his breakfast
engagement as he strode into the Newport Art Gallery. His cheque
for one hundred and twenty-five dollars was soon transferred to
Lilienthal in return for the coveted picture, which was dispatched
to the young man's lonely apartment.

"Not a bad turn," mused Adolf Lilienthal. "I raised him seventy-five
dollars! He paid like a prince, and, if I mistake not, this is his
first and last transaction here. The picture that he wanted is
burned into his heart now."

It was but one of a hundred similar intrigues to which Lilienthal
had been the successful Leporello, and he calmly betook himself to
the continued villainy of his daily life. He feared also to follow
on the footsteps of the crafty Fritz Braun, for in the years of
their illicit dealings the weaker nature had been molded by the
daring master villain into a habitual subjection. "He has some
little game of his own," chuckled Lilienthal. "Friend Fritz is a
sly one."

But the man, now burning with a new purpose in life, the puppet of
strange destinies, dreamed only of a golden future as he lingered
late that night at the Astor House with Jack Witherspoon.

It was two o'clock before he returned to h