"Thorpe," she said, as if consulting a fellow expert, "do you think Mr. Bing is strong enough to make this journey?" For the first time Thorpe allowed himself a smile--a faint fleeting lighting of the eyes. "Oh, yes, madam," he said. "I think now Mr. Bing is quite himself--quite normal. And then, madam, I shall be with him." THE RED CARPET The Torbys were giving a large dinner-party, and a scarlet carpet was rolled out from the glass and iron of their grilled door to the curb of the Fifth Avenue gutter--a carpet as red as a cardinal's robe, as the flags in the Bolshevist meeting which was being held simultaneously two miles away in Madison Square and giving the police a good deal of trouble. It was customary to put on new clothes and treasured jewels for the Torby parties, for they gave very good parties; they were fashionable, and as they had been important, financially and socially, in New York for two generations, and as most other New Yorkers had only lived there a year or two, the Torbys were generally assumed to be as aboriginal as the rocks of Manhattan Island. As a matter of fact, the first identified Torby, Ephraim by name, had strolled down to the great city from a Vermont farm just before the Civil War, and had made his fortune in questionable real-estate deals during the following years of unrest. But when the present Torby, William, said, "My father used to say that when he held the property at the corner of Twenty-third Street--" it sounded as if the family had always been landed proprietors; and Trevillian Torby, William's son, just twenty-four and not deeply interested in ancestry, had actually come to believe, though he of course knew all the facts, that the Torbys were the oldest and best family in America, and he was very scornful of newcomers from other States or countries who drifted into the metropolis to make their fortunes. Hewer, the Torby butler, stood in the hall, wearing the old-fashioned livery the Torbys affected. Hewer was not the kind of butler who opens the door; on the contrary, when the great double doors had been swung open by two footmen, Hewer was discovered standing back center, doing absolutely nothing, except, if a female guest should be so thoughtless as to direct her steps to the men's dressing-room, or a male to the women's, he set them right with a slight but autocratic gesture of the hand. Hewer was rather a young man to be so very great. He was the son of one of the gamekeepers on the Duke of Wessex's place, and being ambitious and having a weak heart, he allowed it to be known through the proper channels, when the Torbys were staying with the Duke, that he would like to go to America; and the Torbys, who had had a great deal of trouble with butlers, snapped him up at once.