"It's brutal to be so hard up," he mused. "Literature doesn't pay. I might better set up as publisher, open a drug-shop, turn grocer, do anything, in fact, which is brainless and remunerative, than attempt to earn a living by the sweat of my pen. There's that _Interstate Magazine_: the editor sent me a note by a messenger this morning, asking for a story, adding that the messenger would wait _while I wrote it_. Evidently he thinks me three parts stenographer and the rest kaleidoscope. What is a good synonym for an editor, anyway?" And as Jones asked himself this question he glared fiercely in a mirror that extended from cornice to floor. Then, mollified, possibly, by his own appearance, for he was a handsome man, tall, fair, and clear of skin, he threw himself on a sofa, and fell to thinking about the incidents of the ball. For some time past he had been as discreetly attentive as circumstances permitted to a young girl, the only child of a potent financier, and on that particular evening he had sat out the cotillon with her at an assembly. She was very pretty and, unusual as it may seem in a _debutante_, rather coy. But when, a half-hour before, he had wished her sweet dreams in that seductive manner for which he was famous, she had allowed the tips of her fingers to rest in his own just one fleeting second longer than was necessary, and, what is more to the point, had looked into his eyes something which now, under the influence of the brandy-and-soda, seemed almost a promise. "Dear little soul!" he muttered; "if she marries me I will refuse her nothing. It will be the devil's own job, though, to get her any sort of an engagement ring. Tiffany, perhaps, might give me one on credit, but it will have to be something very handsome, something new; not that tiresome solitaire. Those stones I saw the other day--H'm! I wonder what that fellow is staring at me for?" He lounged forward to where the men were seated, and, being asked to draw a chair, graciously accepted the invitation and another brandy-and-soda as well. "It was this way," the stranger exclaimed, excitedly, when he and Jones had been introduced. "I was telling these gentlemen when you came in that you looked like the Grand Duke Sergius--" "Thank you," the novelist answered, affably. "The same to you." "I never saw him though," the stranger continued. "No more have I." "Only his picture." "Your remark, then, was doubly flattering." "But the picture to which I allude was that of a chimerical grand duke." "Really, sir, really you are overwhelming." "But wait a minute, do wait a minute. Mr. Jones, I don't know whether you caught my name: it is Fairbanks--David Fairbanks." "Delighted! I remember it perfectly. My old friend, Nicholas Manhattan, bought a ruby of you once, and a beauty it was. I heard at the time that you made a specialty of them." "So did the grand duke. He came here, you know, on that man-of-war."