stand."

"You haven't stopped to think ... to count the cost," she said. "Imagine
what it would be for a man like you to have a wife he knew nothing
about, just a single figure cut off its background, in a picture he'd
never seen. People would ask: 'Who was she?' and there'd be no answer."

"They'd not ask me that," said Roger obstinately. "And I wouldn't care
what they asked each other. I'm not a society man, though I might enjoy
putting my wife on the top floor. And I can do that with you if I
choose! You say I'm a man of importance. I'm important enough anyhow to
take the wife I want, and to put her where I want her to be."

"Yes, perhaps. But it wouldn't be only for a little while that I'd not
be allowed to tell you about myself. It would be for always. You
couldn't love me enough to be happy in spite of that."

"I could be happy," Roger insisted, "if you'd love me."

"I'd adore you! But...."

"Then there isn't any 'but'. I don't say I shouldn't like to know all
about my wife and her people and her past. Still, I'd rather have you
with a future and no past than any other woman with both. I can't do
without you, and I'm going to have you ... now, to-day, as soon as I can
buy a license and get a parson to make us man and wife."

"But if you should regret it?"

"I never will be sorry, if you'll do what you just said, adore
me ... half as much as I'll adore you."

Her eyes gave him a beautiful answer. Roger Sands felt that nothing
could make him regret the coming of such a romance into his hustling
life.

This, then, was the story behind the sensation when Roger Sands came
back from a short trip to California bringing a wife, a girl who had
been a Miss Beverley White, a girl nobody had ever seen or heard of
before.

III

THE MOUSE

On the same September day, in Moreton and Payntor's department store in
New York, might have been seen a wisp of a girl "cheeking" a manager
into giving her a situation on the strength of her being Irish.

By chance, the side door of the big Sixth Avenue shop opened for Clo
Riley (her true, Irish, baptismal name was Clodagh, but she didn't think
that would "go" in New York), on the day when Roger Sands' stateroom
door, on the Santa Fe Limited, opened for a very different girl and for
Romance. No one would have thought that they could be in the same
story--the mysterious Vision and the little, sharp-faced thing from
County Cork. Yet without Clo Riley it would have bee