said Richard loyally.

They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the
white-starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the
rocky hills of morning.

At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and
ordered the cabman to stop.

"I've dropped a ring," he apologised, as he climbed out. "It was my
mother's, and I'd hate to lose it. I won't detain you a minute--I saw
where it fell."

In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.

But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped directly in front of
the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy express wagon
cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a furniture
van that had no business to be there. He tried to back out, but dropped
his reins and swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a tangled mess of
vehicles and horses.

One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up
commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.

"Why don't you drive on?" said Miss Lantry, impatiently. "We'll be
late."

Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood
of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast space
where Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth street cross one another
as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still
from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward
the converging point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the
struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers' imprecations
to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed
itself around them. The oldest New Yorker among the thousands of
spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a street blockade
of the proportions of this one.

"I'm very sorry," said Richard, as he resumed his seat, "but it looks as
if we are stuck. They won't get this jumble loosened up in an hour. It
was my fault. If I hadn't dropped the ring we--"

"Let me see the ring," said Miss Lantry. "Now that it can't be helped,
I don't care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway."

At 11 o'clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony Rockwall's
door.

"Come in," shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing-gown, reading a
book of piratical adventures.

Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a grey-haired angel that had been
left on earth by mistake.

"They're engaged, Anthony," she said, softly. "She h