however, he would make one attempt more, and meantime ring and order the cab.

John Haviland-he must come of course he was the man he really esteemed most, of all the men he knew. But Birmingham did not like Haviland -and Arthur could not possibly do without the earl-well, so much the worse for his lordship; they could be put at opposite ends of the table. So Haviland went in. Then there was Van Kull and Charlie Townley; there had been some trouble, about a woman, between these two men, and they were not upon the best of terms. But then Arthur particularly wanted Van Kull; his presence at a stag-party was sure to give it just the cachet that it needed, and Charlie was by no means so popular, among the men. But then, he could not be forever deferring to his friends; he would tell Charlie who was coming, and if he didn't like it, he could stay away. And after all, the dinner was but an impromptu affair, gotten up for that very evening; at least, the invitations were to be sent out then, though Arthur had schemed about it for several days; and they might not half of them be disengaged. He had spoken to Birmingham already; he was going out West on the morrow, but had promised to come. Caryl Wemyss-there was another man. Him, at least, he would cut; for he disliked him thoroughly. But, after all, Wemyss was a great card; he affected to look down on young men, and it would be quite a social triumph for him to get him. (It is difficult perhaps for us, who have seen this celebrated personage from the inside, to realize what a figure-head he had made himself in that portion of American society which has aspirations beyond the ocean.) Yet it would give him the keenest pleasure to leave this man out for once, more so than to put in all the others; for he knew that Wemyss would like to go. Which was the greatest pleasure-ambition or revenge?

A servant came up just here, and whispered that Mr. Holyoke's cab was ready. "Tell him to wait," said Arthur, impatiently; and he admitted Mr. Wemyss, with a sigh, to his list. Who next? There was Lucie Gower, of

course; every one liked Lucie; and Arthur wrote the name, this time with a sigh of relief. Then there was Lionel Derwent. He himself liked him very much.-But confound it, no; Van Kull and Birmingham would leave the room if that self-assertive, carelessly-dressed radical were of the party. Who else was there? Mr. Tamms? Arthur was anxious enough to get on in his business, and had even thought of his angular employer at first. But it really would not do; that was a trifle too much of the shop; he could ask him alone some time, to Coney Island. The list would do as it was: the earl, Wemyss, Van Kull, Gower, Townley, and Haviland.

He looked at his watch again; it was after four, and little Gussie Mortimer, that dried-up old beau, would be sure to be there by this time; he always went first, to get his fine work in with the very youngest girls, while the coast was clear. There was no use seeing Gracie with Gussie Mortimer. He might as well write the notes and get them off; some of the men he could see at the Livingstones, and Birmingham he was sure of, as that gentleman had lately been accepting his hospitality at the Hill-and-Dale Club, and he had asked him yesterday.

But Jimmy De Witt came in just then, and began to talk; it was nice to be clapped on the shoulder by him, for he was very rich, in the right of his wife, and given to entertaining. An enviable fellow, popular, a great athlete, with a rich and pretty wife, who did not look much to his comings in and goings out, having far too good a time herself for that. It will be seen that Arthur's ideas had changed a little from his poetry days; but what would you have? He had been studying les moyens de parvenir since then. New York life is not a lyric, nor yet an epic, or we had not called this book a satire. Before he knew it, Arthur had asked him to dinner also, and Tony Duval; and then remembered that the latter always cut John Haviland. But everything seemed to go wrong that afternoon; the very de'il was in it. Derwent came in too, and asked him if he was not going to the Livingstones. Arthur answered irritably; and felt glad he had not invited

him. He should go, he said, if he got time. So, that we may not miss the kettledrum ourselves, perhaps we had better accompany Derwent.

For Gracie has long been wondering why Arthur has not come; she has looked forward to her "coming out" chiefly that she might see our hero every day once more. Derwent goes to her at once. "I have just left a friend of yours lamenting that he cannot get here sooner," says he. 'Holyoke was positively savage that he was kept so long down town." It was a white lie, I know; yet few men would have been at the pains to tell it. And Gracie smiles once more; and the burly, blond-bearded man stays by her, like some comforting, protecting power. But he seems destined to annoy his friends that afternoon; for Charlie Townley finds him near by, too, and with quite other feelings. Charlie was there early enough, you may be sure; and he is sitting with pretty Mamie Livingstone on a sofa just behind them. And Birmingham, I fear, is cursing Derwent too; such a knack have fanatics of making themselves disagreeable! For every time he makes a pretty compliment to Miss Farnum-and pretty compliments are slow and heavy things for our peer of the realm to struggle with-it seems as if his beautiful companion caught Derwent's eye. And the beauty is, even to the Briton's eye, a bit unconscious of his fine speeches; and looks about her as if she too were looking for some other swain. Only Mrs. Gower and Wemyss seem to have escaped; but they are sitting by a certain screen in the tea-room and fancy themselves unseen; so they are, indeed, save by the eyes of some old dowagers the same who had called upon her the day of the drive-barbed by a touch of malice to a keener sight than even "that damned adventurer's," as Birmingham calls him. But Daisy De Witt is there, in a gorgeous dress her novel matronhood permits her, perfectly happy yet; and Kill Van Kull, her partner, manages to get his amusement out of all the world and everywheres.

Then Derwent takes his seat by Mamie, calmly turning Charlie's flank. So the Wall Street knight has to retreat; and Derwent flirts most desper

ately, so that her little head-heartwhat shall I say? is tickled. And it is very late when Arthur comes, and he finds that Gracie has gone up-stairs with a headache; so that he is angrier than

ever.

But the dinner that night is a great success. Everybody came-except Van Kull, which is, indeed, a little of a disappointment-and the wines and cooking are most excellent. A great success, that is, until Wemyss, most unfortunately, began to talk of American families. Some one said something about Kitty Farnum, and what a fine woman she was, and what a pity it was that her people were so ordinary. "Pooh!" says his lordship, "all your Yankee families are just alike."

"Without impugning Birmingham's knowledge of American families," says Wemyss, thinking of his own, "I think I may submit that there are differences. Take Mrs. Gower, for instance, Mrs. Levison-Gower, I mean—I think that is a family name not unknown in England, and blood shows itself in every line of her face, and, in every motion of her figure, breeding." Wemyss never forgets his polished periods, even in the heat of argument. "Or take," he goes on, "Miss Holyoke, whom we saw to-day, she is perhaps even a better example of what I mean. She has not perhaps much style; she is countrified, if you like-but she comes of the best old Massachusetts stock, and I submit there is no older blood in the England of today than hers."

"Oh come, now, I say," says his lordship, "you don't mean to set up that little filly against us? That's the sort of thing our governesses are in England."

It is a little hard for Arthur to sit by and hear this; but he remembers that Birmingham is the guest of the evening and keeps silent. But Haviland takes it up. "If that is true, Lord Birmingham, I congratulate you upon your early breeding; and am only sorry that its lessons are so soon forgotten.'

"I think, sir, you should remember the lady is a cousin of our host,” adds Lucie Gower, pluckily.

"Damn it, man," cries Birmingham, "we all think so in England. Do you suppose the Prince cares a curse for

gling with some clumsy speeches of repentance.

"Upon my word," says Wemyss, who has been most uncomfortable throughout this scene, "there has been no such time since the declaration of independence."

"The fact is," adds Charlie, soothingly, "you touched them both on a tender point; that fellow Haviland I suspect of being a rejected suitor for Kitty F. herself; and Arthur, I know, has had a soft spot for his cousin since he was a calf."

But by this time Birmingham is going maudlin; his drunkenness has come on him so quick that Wemyss and Townley have much ado to get him home to bed. He is full of fulsome expressions of regret; and ends with blubbering that he is sorry for what he did.

The next morning, he woke up late, and with a headache, in his room at the hotel that he had found it pleasant (and economical) to abandon for so long; and came down-stairs to find a portmanteau containing all his clothes that he had left at the Hill-and-Dale. With it, but without a letter, were his receipted bills from both the clubs.

Birmingham was very repentant. Late in the afternoon he took a walk with Wemyss, and entered timidly the Coldstream Club, where Townley-good-naturedly-had put him down again. He passed two or three ladies driving on Fifth Avenue who bowed to him no less cordially than before; and in the club some men came up and spoke to him. He began to fancy that the thing was being hushed up; it is so pleasant to hush up disagreeable things, and we Americans do like to be on good terms with every one, lest some one say we are not good fellows. But the earl was mortally ashamed of the evening's occurrences; and finally he mustered up courage, with many brandy-and-sodas, to sit down and compose to Arthur a letter of repentant, almost grovelling apology.

Having done this, he felt that he had done all America could well demand. Judge then of his indignation, when, on the morrow, the letter was returned to him unopened.

It was the first time his lordship had ever had a letter sent back to him un

opened; and he curses Arthur for a cad up to this day. But what he most feared was that some one should bear tales of his behavior to Miss Farnum. For he had thrice asked her to marry him, already.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

CAPTAIN DERWENT SEALS HIS FATE.

THE autumn winds began; winds that in the country bring red leaves, and ripening nuts, and smells of cider, and the crisp white frost; and in the city come with clouds of pungent dust of streets, and sticks and straws, and make one's daily walk and ride a nuisance, not a pleasure. But all the world, or all the world that Arthur saw, was busied with its dresses and with its future entertainments, and with rejoicings over future marriages, and now and here perhaps regrets, and longer days for women, and sterner work for men. For the beauty of our modern view of life is that it bids no man be content who stays in that position where our simple fathers used to say a wise providence had placed him. Not even our primers have this lesson now; but tell us, with A who is the architect of his own fortunes, how we all may rise in life. We are brought to make light of lessons, too-all lessons, from the first and second down-and the small boy has formed the taste of the nation and dictates its likings not only on the fourth of July; let us have our fun, and jest at all the school-marms and the moral tales. For the school - room's mimic can make faces long years before the first scholar understands. Terrible indeed must have been the elders of a generation ago, that we kick our heels so high at having gotten loose from them.

So the race of life began again; and Charlie Townley on the home stretch, but laboring heavily. Old Mr. Townley came to the office seldomer than ever, this but Tamms was there, as regyear; ular as the clockwork beat upon a bomb of dynamite. His wiry red mustache was bitten close above his upper lip, and his discreet eyelids more inflamed than ever. And Charlie knew that all their Allegheny Central stock was still held in the office; and the strike seemed

no nearer to a settlement than ever. "These labor troubles have played the devil with the market," he would say to Charlie; "and public confidence is entirely lost." Tamms depended much on public confidence. And Deacon Remington's brokers would go into the board and sell their ten thousand shares, day after day, as punctually as doom. "They must have borrowed lots of stock," suggested the younger and the smarter Townley. "Can't we squeeze them?' But wary Tamms would shake his head. A " was a risky boomerangsuchlike manœuvres he was too old a bird to try.

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The firm had acquired a new customer that fall; no less a personage than Lionel Derwent. This unaccountable person sold or bought his hundred shares a day, and spent half his time in the office, and pored over the ticker like any other speculator. "So much for your reformers of the world," said young Townley to Arthur; and Arthur would have thought it strange, but that he was so rapidly learning the lesson of the world; and its first lesson is, as he fancied, that all men are alike; a lesson you will hear nowhere so frequently inculcated as in Washington and Wall Street, though we have humbly expressed our own opinion upon this theme before.

Tamms said that Mr. Derwent was a damned nuisance; but he made himself most agreeable to old Mr. Townley, and would hold the old gentleman in converse by the hour whenever he happened to meet him in the office. Derwent seemed still to take great interest in Arthur too; but Charlie found him even a greater bore than Tamms. For he was also a continual visitor at the Livingstones; and Charlie worried over it. "Where a man's treasure is, there shall his heart be also."

Charlie was growing very nervous about the state of things down town; and it would be a little too bad to have the prize snatched from him in the moment of fruition. He had had a devilish good time in his life for the last ten years; since in fact he had got out of leading strings; and then he had looked about him with a judicious eye, and carefully selected the rich girl who seemed,

on the whole, the best adapted to make him comfortable; and he meant to continue to have a good time for many years to come, please the pigs. A conservative estimate (and Townley knew something of the state of the coffers) placed the Livingstone fortune at a million and a half; there was no entangling family, and both Mamie's parents were very old.

So he sent her flowers for every evening's amusement, whether it were concert, ball, or dinner; and called there twice a week; his flowers never came with a card, but always had a sort of trademark of their own. Good judges said that Charlie Townley was compromising himself. Not only this, but all the most recherché little parties that so experienced a fashionable could invent; just the sort of thing that made Mamie's young friends open their eyes, with envy club dinners, and private dances at the country clubs, and seats upon the smartest coaches and in the most unquestioned opera-boxes; and these not mere "bud" parties, but with Mrs. Malgam, Daisy De Witt, or Mrs. Gower herself as guests. Thus Townley wooed her millions with his own scarce dollars and the aid of his acquaintance and his worldly wisdom. And Gracie found that Mamie was infatuated.

Something impelled her to make no secret of her troubles to John Haviland; and Haviland had taken Derwent into council. And that audacious gentleman had seriously proposed, first, kidnapping; taking him off for a cruise in a yacht; a month's delay, he said, was all they needed. Then he suggested that they might get him publicly drunk. The enthusiast was no stickler for the commonplace, at best; Derwent was a man of Oriental methods, obvious and frank. But Townley had, unfortunately, no small vices; it would be quite impossible to get him drunk. And Derwent cursed "the bourgeois squeamishness for human life" that prevented, as he said, "an honest duel, while making dull misery of all one's days, and vulgar trash of the nineteenth century's soul."

People began to wonder why Derwent stayed on in New York. It was true he was very attentive to Mamie Livingstone; but it was scarcely possible that