ating
the refractory light, and my voice was laughingly calling down
maledictions upon the electric lighting company for its wretched
service, my left hand was occupied with the busiest effort of its career
in substituting the spurious tiara for the other."

"And Mrs. Rockerbilt never even suspected?"

"No," said Henriette. "In fact, she placed the bogus affair in her hair
herself. As far as her knowledge goes, I never even touched the
original."

"Well, you're a wonder, Henriette," said I, with a sigh. "Still, if
Mrs. Rockerbilt should ever discover--"

"She won't, Bunny," said Henriette. "She'll never have occasion to test
the genuineness of her tiara. These Newport people have other sources of
income than the vulgar pawnshops."

But, alas! later on Henriette made a discovery herself that for the time
being turned her eyes red with weeping. The Rockerbilt tiara itself was
as bogus as our own copy. There wasn't a real stone in the whole outfit,
and the worst part of it was that under the circumstances Henriette
could not tell anybody over the teacups that Mrs. Rockerbilt was, in
vulgar parlance, "putting up a shine" on high society.

VIII

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY

"Merciful Midas, Bunny," said Henriette one morning as I was removing
the breakfast-tray from her apartment. "Did you see the extent of Mr.
Carnegie's benefactions in the published list this morning?"

"I have not received my paper yet," said I. "Moreover, I doubt if it
will contain any reference to such matters when it does come. You know I
read only the London _Times_, Mrs. Van Raffles. I haven't been able to
go the American newspapers."

"More fool you, then, Bunny," laughed my mistress. "Any man who wants
to pursue crime as a polite diversion and does not read the American
newspapers fails to avail himself of one of the most potent instruments
for the attainment of the highest artistic results. You cannot pick up a
newspaper in any part of the land without discovering somewhere in its
columns some reference to a new variety of house-breaking, some new and
highly artistic method of writing another man's autograph so that when
appended to a check and presented at his bank it will bear the closest
scrutiny to which the paying-teller will subject it, some truly
Napoleonic method of entirely novel design for the sudden parting of the
rich from their possessions. Any university which attempted to add a
School of Peculation to