mine."

Katy's head drooped to the shoulder that was now freed from all
suspicion of having received the knightly accolade.

"Oh, Andy," she sighed, "this is great! Sure, I'll marry wid ye. But
why didn't ye tell me ye was the cook? I was near turnin' ye down for
bein' one of thim foreign counts!"

XXIV

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY

Vuyning left his club, cursing it softly, without any particular
anger. From ten in the morning until eleven it had bored him
immeasurably. Kirk with his fish story, Brooks with his Porto Rico
cigars, old Morrison with his anecdote about the widow, Hepburn with
his invariable luck at billiards--all these afflictions had been
repeated without change of bill or scenery. Besides these morning
evils Miss Allison had refused him again on the night before. But
that was a chronic trouble. Five times she had laughed at his offer
to make her Mrs. Vuyning. He intended to ask her again the next
Wednesday evening.

Vuyning walked along Forty-fourth Street to Broadway, and then
drifted down the great sluice that washes out the dust of the
gold-mines of Gotham. He wore a morning suit of light gray, low, dull
kid shoes, a plain, finely woven straw hat, and his visible linen was
the most delicate possible shade of heliotrope. His necktie was the
blue-gray of a November sky, and its knot was plainly the outcome of
a lordly carelessness combined with an accurate conception of the
most recent dictum of fashion.

Now, to write of a man's haberdashery is a worse thing than to write
a historical novel "around" Paul Jones, or to pen a testimonial to a
hay-fever cure.

Therefore, let it be known that the description of Vuyning's apparel
is germane to the movements of the story, and not to make room for
the new fall stock of goods.

Even Broadway that morning was a discord in Vuyning's ears; and in
his eyes it paralleled for a few dreamy, dreary minutes a certain
howling, scorching, seething, malodorous slice of street that he
remembered in Morocco. He saw the struggling mass of dogs, beggars,
fakirs, slave-drivers and veiled women in carts without horses, the
sun blazing brightly among the bazaars, the piles of rubbish from
ruined temples in the street--and then a lady, passing, jabbed the
ferrule of a parasol in his side and brought him back to Broadway.

Five minutes of his stroll brought him to a certain corner, where a
number of silent, pale-faced men are accustomed to stand, immov