It was late afternoon in the drawing room of Miss Wardrop's house in Washington Square. The short November dusk was fading into night, and outside in the old Square, the street lights gleamed in the frosty air. In the fireplace, before which two people were sitting, a wood fire crackled, throwing fantastic shadows about the old room.

Dinner at Miss Wardrop's was at half after seven. Just why Mr. Smith should have considered it necessary to drop in, on his way home from the Guardian, could no doubt have been better explained had his face not been shaded by his hand. The face in the room best worth seeing, however, was not so shaded, and Smith manifested no displeasure at the fact. He himself sat on the chimney seat, and he appeared to be less talkative than usual. His reticence may or may not have been understood by Miss Maitland, but if it were, she chose to pretend otherwise.

"Why are you so very silent?" she finally asked. "Do you know, it isn't at all flattering. One might think your thoughts were a thousand miles away from here."

"Well, perhaps some of them are," Smith confessed. "And I must really ask your pardon for thinking far away, when I am with you. And yet," he smiled slightly, "perhaps you also came in as an important factor in the background of those far-off thoughts."

"If you are trying to stimulate my curiosity, you have been quite successful," said Miss Maitland, and she waited expectantly.

"Do you remember Mr. O'Connor, the Vice-President of the Guardian?"
Smith asked abruptly.

"Yes. He was the one, wasn't he, who came into Mr. Wintermuth's office for a minute?"

"Yes."

"You say he is Vice-president of the company? Is he a great friend of yours? Perhaps my first impression was wrong, but I don't believe I liked Mr. O'Connor very much—not nearly so much as that amusing Mr. Cuyler, or nice, polite Mr. Wintermuth, or queer, silent Mr. Bartels."

"Well, between you and me, I don't believe your first impression was far from correct. I don't like O'Connor much, myself," said Smith. "More than that, I know he is unfriendly to me. But that is not the point. The point is that he is up to something, and I don't know what it is. And I've got to find out what it is. That's what I was thinking of."

"What kind of a thing do you mean? And what has he done to make you think so?" the girl asked.

"He has succeeded in persuading the President to take the Guardian out of the Eastern Conference. And I can't figure out why. He's got some ulterior motive, but I can't guess what it is."

"What is the Eastern Conference?"

"It's a sort of association of insurance companies doing business in New England, New York, and other Atlantic states. Most of the best companies belong to it. It's a sort of offensive and defensive alliance. It keeps down the general expense of conducting business by limiting the rate of commission its members can pay to any agent, and it supplies inspections to its members and does a lot of other things. But it really isn't a question of what the Conference does for its members so much as a question of what it may do to the Guardian, if the Guardian gets out. There's considerable quiet coercion about such a union, you see—the Conference companies can make it very interesting for an outsider, if they choose to do so. And after a company has been operating on the inside for a good many years, it's hard to jump the fence and make so radical a change. It upsets your organization."

"But why should the Conference try to make you belong? And will they attempt to hurt you if you resign?"

"I don't know. Possibly not. That will soon be seen. But what I can't fathom is why O'Connor, after all these years, should now lay his wires to get the Guardian out. He never does an important thing like that for nothing; he's got some idea in the back of his head. I feel certain of that from the elaborate pains he took to make me think it was not at his instigation that the thing was done. But I know better, for I know O'Connor."

"Haven't you any clew at all?"

"Not really. They're all too vague. I can't for the life of me see what O'Connor has to gain by getting the Guardian out of the Conference. What good can it possibly do him personally?"

"I feel sure you'll hit on the correct solution at last," Helen said thoughtfully, "because I have a distinct remembrance that one of your chance shots went right to the mark when Charlie Wilkinson was trying to get Mr. Hurd to insure his street car company. Charlie thought it was tremendously clever of you. It was the first time I had ever heard of you."

Smith looked at her quickly. Feeling rather than seeing the glance, the girl hastily continued:—

"I wonder whether Mr. Hurd ever decided to carry insurance."

"I wonder, too," the underwriter agreed, with amusement. "If cool nerve counts for anything, your friend Wilkinson ought to have come out all right. I must ask Mr. Osgood about it the next time I go to Boston."

"If he does succeed, I'm sure he'll feel it was quite largely due to your suggestion. And that is why I think you'll eventually solve the mystery of Mr. O'Connor's conduct."

"I wish I could believe it. But I seem to be as far away as when I began to speculate. The only things I can think of don't appear to me to be reasonable."

"What are some of them? Could I understand them?"

"Better than I, very likely. Since I've gotten you so far into this horribly businesslike affair, I may as well go all the way through. As I said, I can't see how O'Connor can personally get any advantage out of this in any conceivable way, so long as he stays with the Guardian."

"But suppose he himself resigned—what then? Or don't people ever leave the Guardian?"

"Oh, minor employees, of course—they're always shifting about. But no one of any importance has left the company, except by old age or death, for a good many years. Nobody knows exactly why, but it's a good company, and every one just stays. And besides, if O'Connor got out to go with some one else, what good would this move have done him?"

"Isn't it just possible that he has gotten the impression the company has treated him badly, and he is trying to do something to hurt it before he leaves?"

"Pure malignance? Hardly that. And besides, if that were so, why should Mr. Wintermuth accept his suggestion? No, I can't believe that is it."

"What could Mr. O'Connor do, supposing that he left the Guardian and went with some other company?"

"That's another thing. As things are now, I don't see how he could do much to hurt us. It would be a bit awkward for us, I don't mind saying, if he went with some Conference company, for some of the insiders are none too scrupulous in their methods against non-Conference competitors. Of course, if the Conference should pass a separation rule—but no, that's impossible."

"What is a separation rule?"

"Why, it's a kind of boycott. The Conference might pass a rule reducing the commission of any agent who also represented non-Conference companies. You see, most agents represent several companies—a good, big agency may perhaps represent fifteen or twenty—and the Conference companies are in the majority in most of the agencies where the Guardian is represented. It would mean that those agents would have to choose between resigning us and having their commissions reduced, and there is very little doubt as to which course they would take. The Conference might even forbid its companies to be represented at all in mixed agencies—where both Conference and non-Conference companies were located—and then those agents would either have to throw us out or lose the bulk of their companies."

"But couldn't they get other non-Conference companies to fill up their agencies and keep the Guardian?"

"No—hardly. There are only a few really high-class companies on the outside. And most of the agents couldn't afford to change. They would simply have to let us go; and that would mean that we'd have to make our agency plant practically all over again."

"And that would be hard to do, I suppose?"

"It would be just about equivalent to building a new company, for the company's agents are the company."

"But you say it's impossible they should pass this rule. Why?"

"Several reasons. It's pretty arbitrary—it looks a little like a combination in restraint of trade, although company organizations in a lot of states have separation rules. But I doubt whether the Eastern Conference has the backbone to put such a rule in effect. Besides, it's scarcely worth while as things now stand—almost all the good companies are in the Conference, and as for the rest, they're either used to them or they feel they're hardly worth bothering about."

"But the Guardian is, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Smith, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is. Still, what good would it do O'Connor? That's what I keep coming back to, because I'm absolutely certain he wouldn't have put this thing through without some personal end in sight."

"Might not he be disinterested, for once?"

"Not O'Connor," said Smith, dryly. "But good heavens! haven't we talked intrigues and cabals and plots long enough? There are one or two other things in life, you know—I've hardly given you a chance to speak, and I've been holding forth like an unsuccessful detective reporting to his superior officer."

And the conversation drifted into other channels.

A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of which is its magical influence upon human relationships. Perhaps its mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng—perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for the mind and the body, but the want of them is stilled in the soul.

Since this is so, in the very home of conventions and conventionalities these artificial ideas become more palpably ridiculous. Surrounded by needless man-made fetters, one sees them to be inane. The wind that blows between the worlds blows in the world's great cities, and it blows, for their lovers at least, the cobwebs from the heart. What is natural is seen to be right, and what is real is seen to be true.

To Smith, lover of his city as he was, these truths were peculiarly obvious; and to Helen Maitland, seeing them largely from the angle of Smith's vision, they became the truth no less. She remembered with some surprise her quite recent dislike of New York, and her even more recent chill of distaste and dread, when she came from the Park, which had checked for the moment the liking she felt springing to life. Of course it was loneliness; but here was a man who had told her that New York's loneliness was one of its greatest charms, and who regarded the apparent heartlessness of the city as one of its most inspiring tonics. Somehow, and apparently most naturally, she found it was coming to seem so to her.

If a man wishes to interest a woman, he does well to speak to her of his enthusiasms; and if he desires to alienate her interest, he will do well to forget them. Smith, who cared deeply for New York, and who was moving unconsciously along the sunny way that led to Helen Maitland, found that never two enthusiasms welded so readily as these. Part of this, no doubt, was due to the city's own influence, but probably the greater part was due to his own genuine understanding and affection for the town itself.

And Helen had not been the readiest of converts, for in the first place, coming as she did from Boston, her sympathies were not with the larger city. She had found its confusion rather tiresome, its contrasts perhaps a little crude, its poverty somewhat distressing, and its wealth a trifle vulgar. With Smith, a new viewpoint was hers, and her old conceptions, which now seemed hopelessly provincial, melted like mist before the sun.

Smith knew his city as a maestro knows his instrument, and their voyages together were like incursions into an enchanted space where time was not. He seemed to know exactly what had been in every nook and corner of the town at every period of its career. Once they stood on Broadway near Columbia University, on whose granite wall was fixed the plate which told of Washington's muster upon those very heights; and Smith had built up for her, not as an historian, but as an actor in the drama, the picture before her eyes. He showed her the old Jumel Mansion farther up town, and they went back together a century and a half to all the strange sights those old halls had seen.

Perhaps the softest spot in Smith's sympathies was held by the Knickerbockers—those sturdy old citizens who seemed all of them somehow to have taken something of the mold of their redoubtable leader and the greatest of them all, Peter Stuyvesant. Smith was familiar with them all, from Peter down. And old Minuit, the Indian, selling his island for a song, was so much a matter of reality to Smith that Helen came to believe in him also as a real individual.

"There he is now!" Smith once suddenly remarked, as they turned a corner and found themselves almost in the arms of an exceptionally spirited cigar-store figure.

"Who?" Helen had asked in surprise.

"Why, old Peter Minuit himself, in the very act of reaching for the proceeds," Smith explained. For which piece of simple levity it is to be feared that he was neither properly ashamed nor adequately rebuked.

It was in the old city, below Twenty-third Street, that the work of time had been most diverse. Here four full eras had left their mark—the aboriginal, the early Dutch, the English-American, and lastly the modern age of granite canyons and sky-seeking towers and marvels of high air and below ground. Smith knew all four, and if one knows where to search, there are plenty of interesting relics of the first three still to be found. He knew how the southern end of Manhattan looked when Hendrick Hudson moored the Half Moon in the lower harbor; and where the shore line lay when the old Dutch keels with their high poops and proud pennons rode at anchor in the river; and again later on when the English flag had replaced the Dutch, and the towering masts of frigates and brigs and schooners made with their threaded rigging a constant etching of the water front.

He guided Helen through old streets where a century's relics still persisted and where one could still find an occasional cornerstone which the flight of a hundred hurrying years had not displaced. He was familiar with most of the old street names,—how West Broadway was once Chapel Street,—many of them long since abandoned for modern changelings far less effective. For the first time Helen realized the origin of the name of "Bouwerie," and how far into New York's and the nation's traditions reached some of the mossy gravestones in Trinity Churchyard.

The city, during the progress of the Civil War, of which Helen had heard Augustus Lispenard speak, was clearer in her vision than ever before, for Smith's grandfather had marched down Broadway in '61, and, unlike Mr. Lispenard, he had not come back.

"They were just starting Central Park," Smith said; "because I have heard mother say often that her father's letters from the front asked several times how the Park was getting along."

"It seems odd, doesn't it? I had always looked on the Park as something which must always have been where it is," Miss Maitland commented. "But I suppose there must have been a beginning some time."

Now all these wanderings and this companionship could not go wholly for naught. Smith was not at all a sentimental person, and Miss Maitland was not in search of emotional adventure, but they were on hazardous ground, and it was hazardous because it was very pleasant to them both.

Miss Mary Wardrop was a lady in whom discretion was held in but lukewarm esteem. Had this not been so, she would have doubtless interposed, for convention's sake at least, in the swiftly developing friendship between her niece and this young insurance man. But Miss Wardrop had long since ceased to care what the world said, and her satisfaction with her own views was sufficient to permit her ignoring those who disagreed with them. She saw nothing objectionable in Smith, and if she speculated on the affair at all, she probably reflected that Miss Maitland was now twenty-five years old and if she didn't know her own mind at that age, it didn't much matter what happened to her.

So Smith, who was blandly ignorant of the fact that propriety as strictly measured in Boston would have been aghast at his candid manner of following his inclinations, met with no obstacles save from Miss Maitland herself. She, it is true, now and again drew back when it seemed to her that their friendship was perhaps progressing too rapidly; but she was not used to men like Smith. There was nothing of the Puritan about him, nothing of the false idea that if a thing is pleasant, it must therefore be somehow sinful. On the contrary, Smith believed that with a normal person the gratification of wishes was the natural result of their possession. If he felt hungry, he ate; if he wanted to see Helen, he went and saw her. Against this hopeless lack of affectation ordinary feminine weapons were badly blunted; in fact, they came to strike Miss Maitland as rather silly. After all, if he wished to see her, why shouldn't he do so? The mere fact that he had seen her the day before was not germane. The one germane thing would have been a lack of inclination on her part to see Smith—and curiously enough, this lack did not manifest itself.

Thus it was that only a few days after their long talk about O'Connor, the same fire saw them together once more. It was Thanksgiving Eve.

"Please don't tell me you have any engagement to-night," said Smith; "for by almost superhuman effort and influence I have managed to reserve a table for three at the CafÉ Turin at eight o'clock. May I call the Honorable Jinks and request Miss Wardrop to come and be invited to dine with me?"

"You might try," said Miss Maitland, smiling.

"Then I will."

When the dignified Jenks had limped upward on his mission, the conversation took another turn.

"You are looking very cheerful to-night," Helen remarked.

"More so than I usually do when you see me?"

"More so than the last time I saw you, at all events. Does this mean that you have correctly solved the O'Connor mystery? You really got me very much interested in it."

"No, I haven't solved it. But I have a clew—the one you gave me. If it is the right one, we shall learn very soon."

On the stairs came the sound of Jenks's returning feet, followed a moment later by the rumor of Miss Wardrop's own approach.

"Good evening," she greeted Smith.

"I've come to ask you a favor," he answered. "I once happened to save the life of a head waiter, and he has now repaid the obligation by reserving a table for me to-night at the CafÉ Turin, and I want you and Miss Maitland to come and dine with me."

Miss Wardrop wavered; she looked at her niece inquiringly.

"Then you'll come," Smith said.

The old lady laughed.

"Apparently I will, if Miss Maitland has no other plan for the evening."

Helen signified that she had none; and thus it was that eight o'clock found them seated in an eligible corner of the big, gay restaurant, watching the animated holiday crowd, and themselves in no somber or taciturn mood.

A restaurant may be the resort of strange people, but it is an institution of peculiar attractiveness, for all that. All the other tables in the room were occupied by merry parties, jewels and demigems glinted back a thousand lights, men and women of society and out of it laughed and talked, there was the clink of a myriad of glasses, the hurrying of anxious and expectant waiters, the tinkle of silverware on china, mingled with the ignored strains of an orchestra invisible and sufficiently remote not to dictate offensively the tempo of mastication of the diners. It was nothing if not a cosmopolitan gathering. In the crowd were, to judge from appearances, foreigners of many races; but all were masquerading as citizens of the world.

"A conglomerate crew," Smith observed. "They like to convey the impression that last week they dined on the terrace at Bertolini's in Naples, or at Claridge's, or Shepheard's at Cairo, or the Madrid in the Bois, or the Poinciana; while as a matter of fact most of them are like myself and get into this sort of game about twice a year."

"Where do you suppose they all come from?" Miss Wardrop inquired. She affected the newer haunts of modern society very little, and this sort of gathering was strange to her.

"Nobody knows," said her host, lightly. "Rahway, Yonkers, Flushing. Probably Harlem would actually account for the majority, if my theory is correct that most of them are as new to this as I am myself."

"Why don't you include Boston in your humble category?" Miss Maitland asked, laughing.

"Because I would be surprised if there were another Bostonian in this room this evening."

"But why do you think so?" the girl persisted.

"Oh, this isn't their style; they don't like this sort of business. No, I'll wager you three macaroons against a lump of sugar that you are the only child of the Back Bay in this place to-night."

"Done!" declared the girl.

"How can the question be decided?" Miss Wardrop inquired. "I don't see how you can either of you prove your contention."

"I will show you," replied her niece. She turned to a waiter, hovering paternally near by, and said, "Will you please go over to that third table where the very light-haired young lady in the blue gown is sitting, and say to the young gentleman whose back is turned toward us that Miss Maitland wishes to speak with him?"

Smith turned, in time to see the young gentleman in question rise at the waiter's message, cast a look at Miss Maitland, and then come cheerfully forward.

"Do you know, I never dine at a place where I hope and expect—and select—to be absolutely unknown, without meeting anywhere from five to nineteen friends, relations, and acquaintances of various degrees of intimacy," he said, shaking hands. "I'm really delighted to see you, Helen—upon my word, I am; but I sincerely hope you are discretion itself."

"Mr. Wilkinson," said the girl, introducing him to her aunt; and with the briefest of glances at Smith, she added, "of Boston."

"I remember Mr. Smith," said Charlie, easily. "There is an epic quality of justice in his being here, because he is indirectly responsible for my presence. At least," he explained, turning to Smith, "if you hadn't made a certain pregnant suggestion of the susceptibility of a trolley magnate to the opinion of the stock market—"

"You don't mean—?" Helen exclaimed.

"As sure as eggs is incubator's children! They hatched. My esteemed uncle listened to my siren voice—and here I am on a celebration trip! By the way," he said to the underwriter, "I asked Bennington Cole, who's handling the schedule for me, to put as much of it as he could in your company."

"That's very good of you," Smith replied; "but it will be a comparatively trifling amount, I'm afraid. The Guardian has just about as much as it is willing to risk in the congested district of Boston, and Silas Osgood and Company are under instructions to keep our liability down to its present amount and take little new business."

"I congratulate you, Charlie," Helen said. "But why did you come here, hoping to be unknown? Is it your beautiful lady? Is she some one you shouldn't know?"

"Well, hardly that. She's not precisely an undesirable citizen—she's all right enough—but you scarcely want to meet her, I'm afraid. You see, Isabel went South and left me in the lurch, and I had to celebrate somehow—hence Amye."

"Amye?" said Smith, with amusement.

"Yes. With an ultimate 'e.' Amye Sinclair on the program; Minnie Schottman in the Hoboken family Bible. She's a nice girl but a trifle unintellectual. She threw me a papier machÉ orchid once in Boston."

"Young man," said Miss Wardrop, speaking for the first time, "are you a typical example of the young men of to-day?"

"I am," Wilkinson promptly answered. "I am energetic, entertaining, an opportunist, a eudaimonist, and a baseball fan. Yes, I think I may concede I am typical. Do you agree with me, Helen?"

"I always agree with you, Charlie," said the girl, with a smile. "What possible good would it do me if I didn't?"

"Oh, you could—but you'll excuse me, I'm sure. I see the waiter is preparing to serve my table with real food, which is something I have a confessed predilection for. Good-by—I'm perfectly charmed to have seen you all."

And Mr. Wilkinson returned to Amye and the Cotuits.

"Don't look so scandalized, Aunt Mary," said Helen to her relation. "He is really much less abandoned than he would have people believe; and I think Isabel will bring him out all right yet. I rather fancy she has decided to."

"Isabel Hurd, you mean?" responded Miss Wardrop. "You don't mean to say so! But, bless your heart, I'm not scandalized—I've heard boys talk before. Still, if your friend Isabel knows what she is about, she won't stay South too long; she'll come North and let Amye go back to Hoboken."

"Probably she will. But I have not seen the three macaroons which I won with such ease and finesse."

"Waiter," said Smith, disregarding the fact that they had not finished the entrÉe, "bring three macaroons—exactly three—right away."

An expression of slight mystification appeared on the broad brow of the waiter, but he was inured to eccentric gastronomic requests, and fulfilled this one with his accustomed dignity.

"There!" said Smith. "There's my bet paid, though strictly speaking you couldn't have held me for it, since you were betting on a certainty."

"May I pass the spoils?" replied the girl, with a laugh.

The memory of those three macaroons had to stand Smith in the stead of other things for the last days of November. On his arrival at the office on the morning following Thanksgiving Day, Mr. O'Connor requested him to go down to Baltimore on company business requiring some little time to transact, and not until after the first of December did he set foot again in New York.

He arrived at about eight o'clock in the morning; and as he was obliged to go home first, he did not reach William Street until nearly ten. As he entered the Guardian office, he was aware that something unusual had happened. Business seemed somehow to have been oddly interrupted. Around the map desks and file cases little groups of clerks were gathered, talking in low tones.

Smith watched them in silence for a moment, and as no one volunteered to enlighten him as to what had occurred, he walked over to Mr. Bartels's office and went in.

"What's the matter here this morning? Is there a conflagration anywhere?" he asked the stolid personage at the desk, who barely ceased his figuring to make response:—

"Go and see the boss. He and O'Connor have had a quarrel—funny business—I don't know anything about it, that's all."

Smith went. Mr. O'Connor was in his room, busily engaged at his desk; the table beside him was heaped high with papers and books, which was an unusual sight, for O'Connor was a methodical man and the room was customarily bare of litter. The General Agent walked thoughtfully over to the other side of the office, and glanced through the President's door. Mr. Wintermuth was walking up and down, his hands behind him and his face a little flushed. Smith hesitated, then deliberately opened the door and entered.

"Good morning, sir. I have—" he began, but his chief, with an expression in which anger was still the predominant characteristic, said abruptly:—

"Do you know what has happened?"

"No, sir, I do not."

"Mr. O'Connor has tendered his resignation, as Vice-President of the
Guardian!"

Smith stood still a long minute without answering, and then he saw suddenly and clearly all that for so many weeks the darkness had hidden from him.

"And did you accept his resignation, sir?" he asked at last.

The President turned swiftly to face the question.

"He tendered his resignation as of December thirty-first. I told him his resignation was accepted as of nine-forty-five this morning. And I told him to pack up his stuff and get out of here and never show himself in the Guardian office again."