forth
with a vigor at which the Virginian marveled. For him ambition blazed
like an oriflamme and he had dared to gamble everything on his belief in
himself. With scant savings out of a reporter's salary in the West he
had come to wrest success from the town where all is possible, but now a
shadow of disappointment was stealing into his eyes. A fear was lurking
there that, after all, he might have mistaken the message of the Bow
Bells which had rung to him the Dick Whittington message that the city
was his to conquer.

Perhaps because Louis Wayne desperately needed to succeed, while Stuart
Farquaharson wrote only as an anodyne to his thoughts, Wayne vainly
peddled his manuscripts and almost from the first Stuart sold his at
excellent rates.

* * * * *

Mrs. Reinold Heath was rarely in a sunny mood at the hour when her
coffee and rolls came to her, as she sat propped against the pillows of
the elaborately hung bed in her French gray and old-rose room. The same
hour which brought the breakfast tray brought Mrs. Heath's social
secretary and those duties which lie incumbent upon a leader of
society's most exploited and inner circles.

Mrs. Heath, kimono-clad in the flooding morning light, looked all of her
fifty years as she nodded curtly to her secretary. It was early winter
and a year had passed since Stuart had left Cape Cod.

"Let's get this beastly business done with, Miss Andrews," began the
great lady sharply. "What animals have you captured this time? By the
way, who invented week-ends, do you suppose? Whoever it was, he's a
public enemy."

The secretary arranged her notes and ran efficiently through their
contents. These people had accepted, those had declined; the
possibilities yet untried contained such-and-such names.

"Why couldn't Harry Merton come?" The question was snapped out
resentfully. "Not that I blame him--I don't see why any one comes--or
why I ask them for that matter."

"He said over the 'phone that he was off for a duck-shooting trip,"
responded Miss Andrews.

"Well, I suppose we can't take out a subpoena for him. He's escaped
and we need another man." Mrs. Heath drew her brow in perplexed thought,
then suddenly demanded: "What was the name of that young man Billy
Waterburn brought to my box at the horse show? I mean the one who rode
over the jumps like a devil and blarneyed me afterward like an angel."

The secretary arched her brows. "Do you mean the V