Mrs. Lee went to the dinner in a truly marvelous gown. It was some curious blending of crimson and black silks, that made her look sombrely clad in one attitude and luridly clad in the next. Her only jewelry was a thin snake of rubies about her slender throat, and the head of the snake, set directly beneath her chin, was a big gold one, having two large garnets for eyes. All the women pronounced her costume ridiculously overdone. All the men professed to like it. She never appeared in gayer spirits. Next to Claire she was the most notable feminine guest. But Claire ruled absolute. She had never been more beautiful, perhaps because she had never felt more secretly and victoriously exultant. The delicious music, the piercing yet tender odor of the lavish flowers, the insidious potency of the wines, which she sipped sparingly and felt dangerously tingle through her veins--all these influences wrought upon her a species of stimulating enthrallment which made the whole splendid banquet seem, on the following day, like some enchanted dream. On one side sat Goldwin, the genius who had created this lovely witchery, urbane, devoted, allegiant; on the other side sat a man of deserved eminence, a wit, a scholar, a statesman. She talked with both companions, and it could not be said that she then charmed both, for one was already her loyal devotee. As for the other, though advanced in years and freighted with pungent experiences, he soon tacitly admitted that he had at last found, at the most discriminating period of his career, a woman whose graces of intelligence and beauty met in faultless unison. As all the ladies rose, leaving the gentlemen to their coffee and cigars, he leaned toward Goldwin, even before Claire's draperies had swept the threshold of the dining-room, and significantly murmured:-- "You were right. She is an event." That dinner was the stepping-stone by which Claire mounted into immediate triumph. All through the next year she was the reigning favorite in just that realm where she had aimed to reign. Her father had died a pauper and been buried as one. She, the mistress of many thousands, having fixedly remembered what a feeble, disappointed, obscure, broken-down man had said to her in early childhood, now stood as the living, actual result of his past counsel. Years ago the seed had been sown in that dingy little basement of One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street. To-day the flower bloomed, rare and beautiful. The little girl had climbed the hill to its top, after all. She had not grown tired and gone home before the top was reached. She had done her father's bidding. She was sure he would be glad if he knew. 'And yet am I quite sure?' she would sometimes ask herself. 'Was this what he really meant when he spoke those words?'