By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending, was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.

Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.

"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."

Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten when thus she praised the girl.

"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is. I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me—and he tried to prevent me from knowing it, too—when, as a cub lawyer, I was first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his—Oh, well, no use in referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the train—after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean—I couldn't help but observe how her resemblance to her father—"

"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of responsibility is so great that—er—that—"

Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his confusion.

The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it. She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to extricate herself from the slough.

Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.

"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."

"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it in the form of a question.

Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.

"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude—often painful solicitude—for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly. "I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through a difficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have the right to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood the test—as we are proud of you now."

"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.

"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand, dear, how profoundly interested—yes, and chivalrously interested, too—John Blythe is in your—your problem."

Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.

"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.

"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is your father's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your—" she hesitated; "—visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course he knows—everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in the world whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. I think he would like to have you feel—I know, in fact, that he would—that he is interested in your—your concerns; that, indeed, in a way, he is standing guard for you."

Louise studied for a little while.

"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said, hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I should have been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasions at your home if I had known that he—" She paused.

"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innate nobility, who knew you when you were a little girl——"

"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard to regard him as—as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like a lawyer at all—at least I have not found him so. He is——"

Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color to reappear on Louise's face.

"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don't you suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hear that you can't regard Mr. Blythe as—as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tell him that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."

"Don't do that—please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laura pinched her cheek reassuringly.

The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones in Laura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionally for coffee—he abominated tea—and a chat at Laura's tea hour in the late afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing him over it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discovery that he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise there almost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drive which had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered the library quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing among the books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them, for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught him yawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women—one woman, Laura said, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car—he had brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess that her rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during her drive.

On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leave them together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythe had talked easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding an agreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhat sober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased—though she could not have told why—to note his possession of a rather unusual social charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of a remarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. His features were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindliness shone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsome judged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one day by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But—again for a reason which she could scarcely have explained—she was glad that Blythe was perhaps two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.

On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certain hesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.

"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He had not offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding that his reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for her which it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention the matter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him, considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life; and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her, it would be explained in due time.

Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type of women who know how to wait.

Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious temperament.

Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women, she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral; her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the sovereignty of convention—"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually called it—and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness. She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd, which made her case abominable, and she knew it.

Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the difficulty as something that would—that would have to—adjust itself. A way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a sacrifice—if any sacrifice at all—on her own part. Perhaps a good marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with futilities of this sort.

Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty, could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own unrest.

"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"

Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.

"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness of which she strove to disguise.

Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head away:

"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed to notice here that maybe—" She struggled for words. "It has never been in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child, but one drifts, drifts, always drifts——"

She could not proceed.

Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.

"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone. "It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can—wait. We shall not speak of it again, shall we, mother?"

Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour later. But Laura did not ask her why.

Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part, required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during the holiday vacation.

One afternoon, at an opera matinÉe, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed, granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.

Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.

"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"

Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear, and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:

"Bella!"

Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.

"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, my sworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"

"Bella!"

This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.

Bella, perceiving then that something was wrong, flushed. But she was loyal to her friend.

"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedly shaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.

"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting, unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm and incontinently marching her off.

Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.

"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation. "Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the way women treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise; she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laura was unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for the remainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned to avoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she saw them before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or "would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.

Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been an accidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return from school, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as to whether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne and Judd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their late afternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning in Laura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a moment Louise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretense of returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article; but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be over with, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggested itself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddied cheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect to where her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regarded Louise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.

"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my daughter Louise."

Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant, was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her mother on the steps.

"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but—er—uppish, what?"

"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne had replied.

After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions—the "salon" which at once provoked and amused Laura—which she attended; but she had exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.

"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks. Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be down?"

It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.

"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a—" Louise stumbled on the word "host."

But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.

"I should not ask you down, else, my dear—you should credit me that far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants—a gift from Laura—around her firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the house, to the already crowded main floor.

Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really was little less than an apotheosis of the declasÉe; she merely found some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naÏve in their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated habit of self laudation.

It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness—an instinct around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed. Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were divorcÉes of more or less note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves, to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake, for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination of at least a tacit repression.

For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse—some of the latter obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical, moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen, white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult; and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial assemblage.

Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any selfish motives of caution—for Laura was in keen demand in the social circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to extinction.

When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the conservatory, had been thrown open—that "the tall girl with the air and the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter—the more privileged ones adverted to their hostess as Tony—there was a sudden cluttering of the passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment—and stimulant—that they spent the major portion of the evening at the buffet.

A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:

"To Tony's daughter—the Empress Louise!"

The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from the punchbowls and took up the refrain:

"The Empress Louise!"

Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly busy at the buffet.

"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts, for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you make another scene here."

"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl—your big girl, I mean; she is an empress, you know, and—"

Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until she bade her goodnight at the door.

Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her about since her entrance upon the scene.

He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed, when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.

He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he reached her side, and said:

"Miss Treharne?"

Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her head.

"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests at times—on such occasions as these, for example—to forego formality. I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to—"

"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs. Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me—Mr. Langdon Jesse. Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."

Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large, blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her. Laura was with her at the time.

"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him last night, Louise?"

"Yes. I disliked him intensely."

"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"

A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes later.