g, that the vessel
might, with luck, crawl up to the quarantine station about midnight,
urgent messages were sent to two consulates and the Port Authorities of
New York. In the result, a fast steam-yacht drew up alongside the
vessel when she took the pilot on board, and the two magnates and their
baggage were transferred from the disabled liner to the deck of the
trim yacht.

She made praiseworthy efforts to reach a quay and a batch of Customs
officers before eight o'clock, but failed by five minutes.
Consequently, some slight delay was experienced, and, with the best of
good will on the part of the officials, the two fuming passengers could
not fling themselves into a waiting automobile until nearly twenty
minutes past the hour.

Then, however, they made up for lost time. Intrusting their belongings
to a porter and a taxi, with instructions to proceed to the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, they bade the chauffeur travel at top speed to
No. 1000 59th Street. Many times were they sworn at en route by
endangered pedestrians and enraged drivers of horsed vehicles; the
growing torrent of ill wishes thus engendered may have exercised some
unrecognized form of telepathy at No. 1000, because a regulating valve
in the steam-heat apparatus, which had never proved intractable before,
suddenly took it into its metallic head to go wrong. Thus, the
elevator man was not aware of a good deal of ringing of electric bells
and hammering on the locked door of flat Number 10.

Ultimately, the valve resumed its normal functions, for no cause that a
hot and oily human being could perceive other than the occasional
"cussedness" which inanimate objects can be capable of; while surveying
it wrathfully, he awoke to the racket in the upper regions.

Behold him, then, angry and perspiring, vowing by all his gods that he
had other duties to perform than eternally watching the comings and
goings of the mansion's occupants; being a free-born American of Irish
ancestry, name of Rafferty, he would certainly have bandied contumely
with Count Ladislas Vassilan had not the Earl intervened. The
Hungarian had addressed Rafferty as though he were a dog: the
Englishman, more certain of his social predominance, treated him as a
person endowed with reason.

"Now, listen to me, my good man," he said, calmly but emphatically, "I
am the Earl of Valletort, and the lady you know as Miss Grandison is
the Lady Hermione Grandison, my daughter. She has come to New Yo