a ball-game to-day!"

With trembling fingers he pulled out his watch. The hands pointed to
five minutes to three. A blessed vision came to him of a moist and
disappointed crowd receiving rain-checks up at the Polo Grounds.

"Switch it on, you blighters!" he cried, addressing the leaden clouds.
"Switch it on more and more!"

It was shortly before five o'clock that a young man bounded into a
jeweller's shop near the Hotel Cosmopolis--a young man who, in spite of
the fact that his coat was torn near the collar and that he oozed
water from every inch of his drenched clothes, appeared in the highest
spirits.. It was only when he spoke that the jeweller recognised in
the human sponge the immaculate youth who had looked in that morning to
order a bracelet.

"I say, old lad," said this young man, "you remember that jolly little
what-not you showed me before lunch?"

"The bracelet, sir?"

"As you observe with a manly candour which does you credit, my dear
old jeweller, the bracelet. Well, produce, exhibit, and bring it forth,
would you mind? Trot it out! Slip it across on a lordly dish!"

"You wished me, surely, to put it aside and send it to the Cosmopolis
to-morrow?"

The young man tapped the jeweller earnestly on his substantial chest.

"What I wished and what I wish now are two bally separate and dashed
distinct things, friend of my college days! Never put off till to-morrow
what you can do to-day, and all that! I'm not taking any more chances.
Not for me! For others, yes, but not for Archibald! Here are the
doubloons, produce the jolly bracelet Thanks!"

The jeweller counted the notes with the same unction which Archie
had observed earlier in the day in the proprietor of the second-hand
clothes-shop. The process made him genial.

"A nasty, wet day, sir, it's been," he observed, chattily.

Archie shook his head.

"Old friend," he said, "you're all wrong. Far otherwise, and not a bit
like it, my dear old trafficker in gems! You've put your finger on
the one aspect of this blighted p.m. that really deserves credit and
respect. Rarely in the experience of a lifetime have I encountered a day
so absolutely bally in nearly every shape and form, but there was one
thing that saved it, and that was its merry old wetness! Toodle-oo,
laddie!"

"Good evening, sir," said the jeweller.

CHAPTER XVI. ARCHIE ACCEPTS A SITUATION

Lucille moved her wrist slowly round, the better to examine the new
bracelet.

"Y