held them up in the snow and spoiled their little game--he would do
it again. How? When? He did not know. His soul cried for action of some
sort, but he was up against a blind alley, and he knew it.

He unlocked the door of number seven. To go down-stairs, to meet the
sweet eagerness of the girl who depended on him, to confess himself
tricked--it took all the courage he had. Why had it all happened,
anyhow? Confound it, hadn't he come up here to be alone with his
thoughts? But, brighter side, it had given him her--or it would give him
her before the last card was played. He shut his teeth tightly, and went
down the stairs.

Mr. Bland had added himself to the group about the fire. Quickly the
eyes of Miss Norton met Magee's. She was trembling with excitement.
Cargan, huge, red, cheery, got in Magee's path once more.

"I'll annihilate this man," thought Magee.

"I've been figuring," said the mayor, "that was one thing he didn't have
to contend with. No, sir, there wasn't any bright young men hunting up
old Napoleon and knocking him in the monthly magazines. They didn't go
down to Sardinia and pump it out of the neighbors that he started
business on borrowed money, and that his father drank more than was good
for him. They didn't run illustrated articles about the diamonds he
wore, and moving pictures of him eating soup."

"No, I guess not," replied Magee abstractedly.

"I reckon there was a lot in _his_ record wasn't meant for the
newspapers," continued Cargan reflectively. "And it didn't get there.
Nap was lucky. He had it on the reformers there. They couldn't squash
him with the power of the press."

Mr. Magee broke away from the mayor's rehashed history, and hurried to
Miss Norton.

"You promised yesterday," he reminded her, "to show me the pictures of
the admiral."

"So I did," she replied, rising quickly. "To think you have spent all
this time in Baldpate Inn and not paid homage to its own particular cock
of the walk."

She led him to a portrait hanging beside the desk.

"Behold," she said, "the admiral on a sunny day in July. Note the
starchy grandeur of him, even with the thermometer up in the clouds.
That's one of the things the rocking-chair fleet adores in him. Can you
imagine the flurry at the approach of all that superiority? Theodore
Roosevelt, William Faversham, and Richard Harding Davis all arriving
together couldn't overshadow the admiral for a minute."

Mr. Magee gazed at the picture of a