enly within. Picking up his
hat and stick, the tall, slim, graceful young man said:

"You have no further commands on the subject, dad? Do you want to pick
the girl, or will you leave it to the taste and sometimes good
judgment of a fool?"

"Haven't you any one in mind, son?" asked Joshua Barnes, anxiously.

"Absolutely not one, pater. You see, the trouble is that I can't ever
seem to get real chummy with a girl but what her mother has to come
and camp on my trail and scare me into fits. You haven't the least
idea what a catch your son is, Joshua Barnes. Why, a mother-in-law
looks to me like something in petticoats that comes creeping up with a
catlike tread, carrying in one hand a net and in the other a
bale-hook. I can't sit out two dances with a debutante before this
nightmare is looking over my shoulder, grinning like a gargoyle and
counting up the number of millions you are going to leave me."

"Oh, bosh!" ejaculated Joshua Barnes. "It's all in your fool
imagination. Grow up and be a man, Whitney. You have given me your
word and I expect you to make good. And by the way, son, there is my
old friend Charley Calker's girl, just out of college. I hear she's a
stunner."

"Mary Calker is a stunner, dad, and then a trifle. But I regret to say
that she is too fresh from the cloistered halls of learning. You see I
have been out of college three years and have managed to forget such a
jolly lot that I really couldn't talk to her. She'd want me to make
love in Latin and correspond in Greek. Worse than that, she
understands Browning. No, poor Mary will have to marry a prescription
clerk, or a florist or something else out of the classics. But, don't
lose heart, pater, I may be engaged before night. By-by."

It was a vastly more solemn Whitney Barnes who strolled out of the
office of the mustard magnate and dragged his feet through the
anteroom where sat Marietta Featherington and Teddie O'Toole. The
comely Miss Featherington could scarcely believe what she saw from
under her jutting puffs.

This good looking, dandified young man, with his perpetual smile and
sparkling gray eyes had long been her conception of all that was noble
and cultured and aristocratic. He was her Viscount Reginald Vere de
Vere, speaking to her as from between yellow paper covers. He was her
prince incognito who fell in love with Lily, the Lovely Laundress. He
had threaded the mazes of more than one of her palpitating dreams, and
in her innermos