-positively naked."

The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she
said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in
higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when
in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."

But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her proteges with the
Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any
picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed
current.

"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion
and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady
answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:

"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that
they're not inordinately happy."

Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man
inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail
glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.

It subsequently developed, in a tete-a-tete with the wife, that she had
read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out
with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and
yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a
composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.

In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation
would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a
matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold
Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing
and whom she captured she held in bondage.

"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that
lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between
ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.
Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have
dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold
fish."

Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew
you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you
_have_ to come." So he went.

On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that
the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy
intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.
It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was