y
one else would have expected to meddle with them. This was Billie
Brookton, married to her Chicago millionaire, and trying, tooth and
nail, with the aid of his money, to break into the inner fastnesses of
New York and Newport's Four Hundred. It was all because of a certain
resistance to her efforts that suddenly, out of revenge and not through
love, she took up Max's cause. The powder train was--unwittingly--laid
months before by Josephine Doran-Reeves, as she preferred to call
herself after her marriage with the son of the Dorans' lawyer. Neither
she nor Grant--who had taken the name of Doran-Reeves also--liked to
think or talk of the man who had disappeared. On consideration, the
Reeveses, father and son, had decided not to make public the story of
Josephine's birth which Max had given to them. They feared that his
great sacrifice would create too much sympathy for Max and rouse
indignation against Josephine and her husband for accepting it, allowing
the martyr to disappear, penniless, into space. At first they said
nothing at all about him, merely giving out that Josephine Doran was a
distant relative who had been brought to the Doran house on Rose's
death; but all sorts of inconvenient questions began to be asked about
Max Doran, into whose house and fortune the strange-looking,
half-beautiful, half-terrible, red-haired girl had suddenly,
inexplicably stepped.

Max's friends in society and the army did not let him pass into oblivion
without a word; therefore some sort of story had to eventually be told
to silence tongues, and, still worse, newspapers. Grant was singularly
good at making up stories, and always had been since, as a boy, he had
unobtrusively contrived to throw blame off his own shoulders on to those
of Max if they were in a scrape together.

Half a lie, nicely mixed with a few truths, makes a concoction that the
public swallows readily. Max was too young, and had been too much away
from New York, to be greatly missed there, despite Rose Doran's
popularity; and when such an interesting and handsome couple as Grant
and Josephine Doran-Reeves began entertaining gorgeously in the
renovated Doran house, the ex-lieutenant of cavalry was forgotten
comparatively soon. It seemed, according to reluctant admissions made at
last by Grant and Josephine to their acquaintances, that Max had had
secret reasons for resigning his commission in the army and vanishing
into space. It was his own wish to give up the old