o he could
direct the _cocher_. Mrs. Blake said she would get out here. Her
dressmaker was close by, in the Rue Auber, and she would walk back
to the hotel to meet them at seven o'clock. Jefferson assisted her
to alight and escorted her as far as the _porte-cochere_ of the
modiste's, a couple of doors away. When he returned to the
carriage, Shirley had already told the coachman where to go. He
got in and the _fiacre_ started.

"Now," said Shirley, "tell me what you have been doing with
yourself all day."

Jefferson was busily arranging the faded carriage rug about
Shirley, spending more time in the task perhaps than was
absolutely necessary, and she had to repeat the question.

"Doing?" he echoed with a smile, "I've been doing two
things--waiting impatiently for seven o'clock and incidentally
reading the notices of your book."

CHAPTER IV

"Tell me, what do the papers say?"

Settling herself comfortably back in the carriage, Shirley
questioned Jefferson with eagerness, even anxiety. She had been
impatiently awaiting the arrival of the newspapers from "home,"
for so much depended on this first effort. She knew her book had
been praised in some quarters, and her publishers had written her
that the sales were bigger every day, but she was curious to learn
how it had been received by the reviewers.

In truth, it had been no slight achievement for a young writer of
her inexperience, a mere tyro in literature, to attract so much
attention with her first book. The success almost threatened to
turn her head, she had told her aunt laughingly, although she was
sure it could never do that. She fully realized that it was the
subject rather than the skill of the narrator that counted in the
book's success, also the fact that it had come out at a timely
moment, when the whole world was talking of the Money Peril. Had
not President Roosevelt, in a recent sensational speech, declared
that it might be necessary for the State to curb the colossal
fortunes of America, and was not her hero, John Burkett Ryder, the
richest of them all? Any way they looked at it, the success of the
book was most gratifying.

While she was an attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley
Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features
were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed
the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her
face something far more appealing--soul and character. The