ved for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
bric-a-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
bric-a-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
disagreeable task.

Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
social ills had adjusted themselves.

Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.

A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
tossing on the hearth, the