e can
arrange dates and other details of the production, for my mind is
made up. I am going to do your play, come what will. I thank you
for having started all my dormant resolutions into life again. I
shall expect you at twelve-thirty."

Having despatched this note by special messenger, she serenely set to
work on less important matters, and met him in modish street dress--trim
and neat and very far from the meretricious glitter of _The Baroness_.
He was glad of this; he would have disliked her in negligee, no matter
how "artistic."

Her greeting was frank and unstudied. "I'm glad you've come. There are
oceans of things to talk over."

"There was nothing else for me to do but come," he replied, with a
meaning light in his eyes. "Your letter was a command."

"I'm sorry it takes a command to bring you to breakfast with us. True,
this is not the breakfast to be given in your honor--that will come
later."

"It would be safer to have it before the play is produced," he replied,
grimly.

Helen turned to her brother. "Hugh, we have in Mr. Douglass a man not
sanguine of the success of his play. What does that argue?"

"A big hit!" he promptly replied.

The servants came and went deftly, and Douglass quite lost sight of the
fact that the breakfast-room was high in a tower-like hotel, for Helen's
long engagement in the city had enabled her to make herself exceedingly
comfortable even amid the hectic color and insistent gilt of the Hotel
Embric. The apartment not only received the sun, a royal privilege in
New York, but it was gay with flowers, both potted and in vases, and the
walls were decorated with drawings of her own choosing. Only the
furniture remained uncompromisingly of the hotel tone.

"I did intend to refurnish, but mother, who retains a little of her old
Scotch training, talked me out of it," Helen explained, in answer to a
query. "Is there anything more hopelessly 'handsome' and shining than
these chairs? There's so little to find fault with, and so little to
really admire."

"They're like a ready-made suit--unobjectionable, but not fit."

"They have no soul. How could they have? They were made by machines for
undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager
for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless
as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the
auto is still in the tinkery stage."

"I have a feeling that it