hey were reporters of the entire world's
press, to each of whom Isabel Joy had been specially "assigned." They
were waiting; they would wait.

Mr. Rentoul Smiles having been warned by telephone of the visit of his
beloved friend, Seven Sachs, Mr. Sachs and his English _protege_ had
been received at Smiles's outer door by a clerk who knew exactly what
to do with them, and did it.

"Is she here?" Mr. Sachs had murmured.

"Yep," the clerk had negligently replied.

And now Edward Henry beheld the objective of his pilgrimage, her whose
personality, portrait and adventures had been filling the newspapers
of two hemispheres for three weeks past. She was not realistically
like her portraits. She was a little, thin, pale, obviously nervous
woman, of any age from thirty-five to fifty, with fair untidy hair,
and pale grey-blue eyes that showed the dreamer, the idealist and
the harsh fanatic. She looked as though a moderate breeze would have
overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as
though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit
of her vision. The blind dreaming force behind her apparent frailty
would strike terror into the heart of any man intelligent enough to
understand it. Edward Henry had an inward shudder. "Great Scott!" he
reflected. "I shouldn't like to be ill and have Isabel for a nurse!"

And his mind at once flew to Nellie, and then to Elsie April. "And
so she's going to marry Wrissell!" he reflected, and could scarcely
believe it.

Then he violently wrenched his mind back to the immediate
objective. He wondered why Isabel Joy should wear a bowler hat and a
mustard-coloured jacket that resembled a sporting man's overcoat; and
why these garments suited her. With a whip in her hand she could have
sat for a jockey. And yet she was a woman, and very feminine, and
probably old enough to be Elsie April's mother! A disconcerting world,
he thought.

The "man's photographer," as he was described in copper on Fifth
Avenue and in gold on his own doors, was a big, loosely-articulated
male, who loured over the trifle Isabel like a cloud over a sheep in a
great field. Edward Henry could only see his broad bending back as he
posed in athletic attitudes behind the camera.

Suddenly Rentoul Smiles dashed to a switch, and Isabel's wistful face
was transformed into that of a drowned corpse, into a dreadful harmony
of greens and purples.

"Now," said Rentoul Smiles, in a deep voi