Dufour laughed heartily, as if he had caught some occult humor from the young woman's words. "I did write it," said Crane retrospectively, "and sent it to George Dunkirk & Co." "Well?" sighed Miss Crabb with intense interest. "Well," replied Crane, "they rejected the MS. without reading it." Again Dufour laughed, as if at a good joke. "George Dunkirk & Co.!" cried Guilford Ferris, the romancer, "George Dunkirk & Co.! They are thieves. They have been making false reports on copyright to me for five years or more!" Dufour chuckled as if his jaws would fall off, and finally with a red face and gleaming humorous eyes got up from the chair he was filling on the veranda, and went up to his room. The rest of the company looked at one another inquiringly. "Who is he, anyhow?" demanded Peck. "That's just my query," said Ferris. "Nobody in the house knows anything definite about him," remarked R. Hobbs Lucas. "And yet he evidently is a distinguished person, and his name haunts me." "So it does me," said Miss Moyne. "I tell you he's a newspaper reporter. His cheek proves that," remarked Peck. Miss Crabb made a note, her own cheek flaming. "I presume you call that humor," she observed, "it's about like New York's best efforts. In the West reporters are respectable people." "I beg pardon," Peck said hastily, "I did not mean to insinuate that anybody is not respectable. Everybody is eminently respectable if I speak of them. I never trouble myself with the other kind." "Well, I don't believe that Mr. Dufour is a reporter at all," replied Miss Crabb, with emphasis, "for he's not inquisitive, he don't make notes, and he don't appear to be writing any." "In my opinion he's a realist--a genuine analytical, motive-dissecting, commonplace-recording, international novelist in disguise," said Ferris. "Oh!" "Ah!" "Dear me!" "But who?" "It may be Arthur Selby himself, incog. Who knows?" "Humph!" growled Crane with a lofty scrowl, "I should think I ought to know Selby. I drank wine with him at--" His remark was cut short by the arrival of the mail and the general scramble that followed. Upon this occasion the number of newspapers that fell to the hand of each guest was much greater than usual, and it was soon discovered that Miss Crabb's latest letter had been forwarded to a "syndicate" and was appearing simultaneously in ninety odd different journals. No piece of composition ever was more stunningly realistic or more impartially, nay, abjectly truthful than was that letter. It gave a minute account of the quarrel between Peck and Crane over their attentions to Miss Moyne, the fight, Miss Crabb's fall, the subsequent adventures and all the hotel gossip of every sort. It was personal to the last degree, but it was not in the slightest libelous. No person could say that any untruth had been told, or even that any tinge of false-coloring had been laid upon the facts as recorded; and yet how merciless!