Chapter III - Page 2

overhanging mustache. His name was 'Gene Bisbee, and there was a tradition that in his younger days he had been handsome, and irresistible to the women who had made his fortune.

Ruyler was absently wondering what his haughty mother-in-law could have to say to such a man when to his amazement Bisbee planted his elbow in the pillow of flesh just below Madame Delano's neck, and said easily:

"Oh, come off, Marie. I'd know you if you were twenty years older and fifty pounds heavier--and that's going some. Bimmer and two or three others are not so sure--won't bet on it--for twenty years, and, let me see--you weighed about a hundred and thirty-five--perfect figger--in the old days. Must weigh two seventy-five now. That makes one forty-five pounds extra. Well, that and time, and white hair, would change pretty near any woman, particularly one with small features. You look a real old lady, and you can't be mor'n forty-five. How did you manage the white hair? Bleach?"

Ruyler felt his heart turn over. The frozen blood pounded in his brain and distended his own muscles, his mouth unclosed to let his breath escape. Then he became aware that the woman had recovered herself and moved forward, displacing the familiar elbow. She turned imperiously to the motorman.

"Stop at the corner," she said. "And if this man attempts to follow me please send back a policeman. He is intoxicated."

The car stopped at the corner of the street opposite the site of the old Saint Mary's Cathedral, a street where once had been that row of small and evil cottages where French women, painted, scantily dressed in a travesty of the evening gown, called to the passer-by through the slats of old-fashioned green shutters. That had been before Ruyler's day, but he knew the history of the neighborhood, and this man's interest in it. He was not surprised to hear Bisbee laugh aloud as Madame Delano, who stepped off the car with astonishing agility, waddled down the now respectable street. But she held her head majestically and did not look back.

Ruyler squared his back lest the man, glancing over, recognize him. That would be more than he could bear. As the car reached Front Street he sprang from the dummy and walked rapidly north to Ruyler and Sons. He locked himself in his private office, dismissing his stenographer with the excuse that he had important business to think out and must not be disturbed.

II

But business was forgotten. He was as nearly in a state of panic as was possible for a man of his inheritance and ordered life. He belonged to that class of New Yorker that looked with cold disgust upon the women of commerce. So far as he knew he had never exchanged a word with one of them, and had often listened with impatience to the reminiscences of his San Francisco friends, now married and at least intermittently decent, of the famous ladies who once had reigned in the gay