and again to tell himself that he was a lucky beggar, that he ought to be only too glad to rub elbows with these obviously successful men and women of the world, even though they did chance, at that particular moment, to be frolicking about like a band of undergraduates after a bump-race, and variedly shocking his youthful sense of propriety.

For the old artist's army of friends had brought along with them armfuls of gifts, many of them costly, many of them ingeniously grotesque, and the traditional formality of presenting these tokens, with many cheers and shouts of laughter and much clapping of hands, again left Hartley puzzling over a phase of American humor which is, perhaps, always incomprehensible to the outlander.

The proceedings began when a slip of a girl—who had been pointed out to Hartley as the author of no less than three lugubrious historical romances—timidly approached the old artist, and blushingly thrust her great armful of Jacque roses into his hands. "There's one for every year," she said prettily enough, "and one over, sir, to grow on." Then the white-haired old editor of "The Republic" came marching up with a toy drum, beating a vigorous tattoo thereon, and with even more solemnity bestowed it in turn upon the artist. After him came an attenuated novelist in spectacles, bearing an old horseshoe and a chocolate pig. A stout, florid-looking man, with all the earmarks of the musician, soberly produced a huge tin trumpet, and a demure and quite shy-looking young lady, who had been pointed out as Frohman's new leading woman, tripped over to her host with a bag of pink candies and a jumping-jack. Of the agility of the jumping-jack she gave a sober and conscientious exhibition, after which came a Noah's ark from some one else, with a solemn caution that the paint was not to be sucked off, and then a portrait of Repellier himself, done in yellow and indigo blue, with cotton-wool hair attached to the canvas and eyes that rolled automatically.

Then the entire gathering lined up in a final laughing procession, and the horn was tooted, and the drum was beaten, and the orchestra struck up For he's a Jolly Good Fellow, and Repellier himself was taken possession of, and carried triumphantly off on the shoulders of the men. They hoisted him bodily up into a chair on the studio table, and all joined hands and danced round him, men and women alike, as children dance about a May-pole. Then they crowded in on him and clamored for a speech. It was not a very good speech, and it had many interruptions, but it was delivered in time and agreed to, point by point, and vigorously applauded. The great depleted punch-bowls were brought over to the table, and glasses, cups, vases, and steins were seized on for a final toast, in which the artists themselves led, with up-poised glasses, singing the while the reminiscent lines of a Parisian cabaret song. Then the men filed past, one by one, all wringing his hand, some patting him familiarly and affectionately on his stooping old shoulder. Then a body of women and girls suddenly seized on him, and amid hostile demonstrations and much mockery of envy, fluttered up boldly, one by one, and kissed him fearlessly. Then back behind its bank of azaleas the muffled orchestra once more broke out with Auld Lang Syne, and they sang it together, with joined hands, till there was just the suspicion of a tear or two in Repellier's kindly gray eyes as he turned to the bewildered Hartley and said it was all very, very nearly worth growing old for.

Then somebody discovered a way to the roof, and nothing would do but every one must go climbing and scrambling gaily up a rickety old ladder to the fresh night air, where Hartley noticed that a number of the women were taking advantage of the gloom of the housetop to steal a quiet puff or two at a cigarette. And while he was noting this lamentable lapse from what was fit and proper somewhere in the half light behind him he heard a woman's voice say: "Mr. Repellier, won't you introduce me to that nice, big, clean-looking boy you have here?"

There was a moment's silence, while Repellier seemed to be looking down at her.

"If you promise not to break his heart, Miss Vaughan."

A woman's low, quiet little laugh drifted softly through the night air. Hartley tried to look at the Great Bear, and not listen to more.

"Here's my hand on it." Then the jesting voice grew suddenly serious. "But women's hearts never break nowadays, do they? They only wither." Hartley, who had grown hot and cold through his six feet of embarrassed bone and nerve, was dimly conscious the next minute of Repellier's leading over to him a slim-looking figure in yellow.

Women accept the confusion of stalwart manhood, it has been said, as the profoundest tribute to their own power; and after Hartley had murmured something about the honor of meeting so eminent a novelist and in his honest embarrassment blurted out that he had often seen her name on the city ash-barrels, Cordelia Vaughan forgot her hazily indefinite yet deep-rooted hatred of everything English, and waited a moment for his next words.

"They've dramatized a book of mine—that explains the ash-barrels," she explained deprecatively, seeing that he stood silent, laughing at her contempt of the ash-barrels. Hartley liked her the better for that touch of modesty.

Her eyes had followed Repellier's retreating figure through the gloom. "Do you know, I always felt half afraid of Mr. Repellier, in some way? I wonder why it is?"

"We always are half afraid of great men; they're so apt to be rugged and lonely."

"Yes, rugged and lonely, like lighthouses—but very useful."

Hartley waited for her voice again. By moonlight all waters and all women may look the same, but Luna had no such leveling power, he knew, with voices.

"He confessed to me you were the Hartley who wrote a study of slum life for Stetson's," the flute-like contralto was saying again. "Then you do write?"

The darkness of the night made it impossible for him to catch even the slightest outline of her face, but as he listened to her gloom-encompassed voice he wondered, in a sudden inner fury, just what she had meant by calling him clean-looking. He had a sense, nevertheless, of losing himself in the sweep of eddying breakers.

"It always seemed to me," the soft contralto was murmuring once more, "that writers and artists should never be viewed at close range. They're like sugar; they should be left to sweeten life, without being put under the microscope, to show all their poor little writhing realities. So in one way it's just as well that we two will never know each other when next we meet."

He felt certain, as she ended with her warm little laugh, that she was looking up at him through the darkness, and he vehemently asked himself if she was still making fun of him.

"I wonder if we two will know each other again?"

"I want to, so much!" said Hartley. He was very human.

"Then you may interview me," she said gaily, infecting him with the sudden romance of the situation. "Then you can tear me to pieces afterward." And they both laughed youthfully as he told her of his last assignment, a request to demand five of New York's most eminent men to draw a pig with their eyes shut, for an illustrated page of the United News Bureau.

They grew serious once more, and he asked if there was nothing in which he could help her.

"Couldn't I, in any way?" he begged, the darkness helping him out.

"Would you?" she said, quite gravely now, leaning imperceptibly closer to him in the muffling twilight. Her flash of woman's intuition had not misled her; there was much about him that she liked.

"Won't you let me?" he asked again even more earnestly. He was still half afraid it was all mere play, but his artistic soul's sense of dramatic values chained him to the part.

"Yes," she said simply, "I will." Her voice carried with it a timorous and tacit something, a something which flashed over the heads of a