after school came the deluge. I was restless, shabby and single—no one of which mother could endure in her daughter.

So I was a disappointment to her, while the rest of the tribe gloated. The name, Grace, with all appurtenances and emoluments accruing thereto, availed nothing. I was a failure.

"My pet abomination begins with C," I chattered savagely to myself one afternoon in June, a suitable number of years after the above-mentioned christening, as I made my way to my own private desk in the office of The Oldburgh Herald, pondering family affairs in my heart as I went. "Of course this is at the bottom of the whole agony! They just can't bear to see me turn out to be a newspaper reporter instead of Mrs. Guilford Blake. And I hate everything that they love best—cities, clothes, clubs, culture, civilities, conventions, chiffons!"

I was thinking of Cousin Pollie's comment when she first saw a feature story in the Herald signed with my name.

"Is the girl named Grace or Disgrace?" she had asked. "Not since America was a wilderness has the name of any Christie woman appeared outside the head-lines of the society column!"

"The whole connection has raised its eyebrows," I laughed, when I met the owner and publisher of the paper down in his private office the next day. He was an old friend of the family, having fought beside my revered grandfather, and he had taken me into the family circle of the Herald more out of sympathy than need.

"That's all right! It's better to raise an eyebrow than to raise hell!" he laughed back.

But on the June afternoon I have in mind, when I hurried up-town thinking over my pet abominations beginning with C, I was still a fairly civilized being. I lived at home with mother in the old house, for one thing, instead of in an independent apartment, after the fashion of emancipated women—and I still wore Guilford Blake's heirloom scarab ring.

"Aren't your nerves a little on edge just now, Grace, from the scene this morning?" something kept whispering in my ears in an effort to tame my savagery. It was the soft virtuous personality of my inner consciousness, which, according to science, was Grandfather Moore. "You'll be all right, my dear, as soon as you make up your mind to do the square thing about this matter which is agitating you. And of course you are going to do the square thing. Money isn't all there is."

"Now, that's all rot, parson!" Uncle Lancelot, in the other hemisphere of my brain, denied stoutly. "Don't listen to him, Grace! You can't go on living this crocheted life, and money will bring freedom."

"He's a sophist, Grace," came convincingly across the wires.

"He's a purist, Grace," flashed back.

"Hush! Hush! What do two old Kilkenny cats of ancestors know about my problems?" I cried fiercely. Then, partly to drown out their clamor, I kept on: "My pet abominations in several syllables are—checkered career—contiguous choice—just because his mother and mine lived next door when they were girls—circumscribed capabilities—"

"And the desire of your heart begins with H," Uncle Lancelot said triumphantly. "You want Happy Humanness—different brand and harder to get than Human Happiness—you want a House that is a Home, and above all else you want a Husband with a sense of Humor!"

"But how could this letter affect all this?" I asked myself, stopping at the foot of the steps to take a message in rich vellum stationery from my bag. "How can so much be contained in one little envelope?"

After all, this was what it said:

There was an embossed superscription on the envelope's flap which read: "Coburn-Colt Company, Publishers, Philadelphia." They were America's best-known promoters—the kind who could take six inches of advertising and a red-and-gold binding and make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

"'Small fortune!'" I repeated. "Surely a great temptation does descend during a hungry spell—in real life, as well as in human documents."

CHAPTER II
A GLIMPSE OF PROMISED LAND

"Hello, Grace!"

I was passing the society editor in her den a moment later, and she called out a cheery greeting, although she didn't look up from her task. She was polishing her finger-nails as busily as if she lived for her hands—not by them.

"Hello, Jane!"

My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.

"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.—The head-line was weak and isolated—while the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede track!

But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's desk—certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! Every one had missed its mark, and up and down the length of the room the typewriters were clicking falsetto notes. The files of papers on the table were in as much confusion as patterns for heathen petticoats at a missionary meeting.

"What's up?"

I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know—from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.

"Search me!" he answered—as usual.

"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted. "Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a moth-ball."

"Huh?"

He looked around—then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did hear 'em say—"

"What?"

"That they can't get hold of that story about the Consolidated Traction Company."

"—And damn those