He had acquired an unpleasant habit of lying awake for hours in that big lonely study of his, of seeking in vain to recover his old-time power of perfect self-mastery. Thought, Memory, Unrest—a trio that never could unduly assail him in saner hours—now had a way of rushing in upon the insomniac with the extinguishing of the last light. To-night these unwelcomed guests were lingering still longer than usual, and all the Conover’s dominating will power failed to banish them. At length he gave over the struggle and let his vagrant fancies have their will. Was he growing old, he wondered, that his forces—mental, physical and political—thus wavered? Worry? He had heard others complain of it, and he had laughed at them. Nerves? Those were for women. Not for a man with an eighteen-inch neck. Then what ailed him? He had been this way ever since—ever since—Yes, it was the night Anice Lanier left that he had first lain awake. Anice Lanier! He had never analyzed his feelings toward her. He had been dully satisfied to know that in her presence he ever had an unwonted feeling of content, of sure knowledge that she would understand; that she was as unlike his general idea of women as he himself differed from his equally contemptuous estimate of other men; that he was at his best with her. Had he been less practical and more given to hackneyed phrases of thought, he would have said she inspired him. But now? The Railroader could not yet force himself to dwell on the jarring end of all that. He tried to think of something else. Blanche? Yes, _there_ was a nice sort of complication, wasn’t it? Another international marriage and the usual ending thereof. “These foreigners can give us poor Yankee jays cards and spades at the bunco game!” he mused, half-admiringly. “They beat _our_ ‘con’ men hands down, for they don’t even need to pay out cash in manufacturing green goods and gold bricks, and they don’t get jugged when they’re found out. When’ll American girls get sense? When their parents do, I presume.” And this unwelcome answer to his own question brought him back to the memory of his joy at hearing of Blanche’s proposed marriage to d’Antri. It had seemed to him to set the capstone of fulfilment to his social yearnings. As father of a princess, he had in fancy seen himself at last exalted amid the close-serried ranks of that class to whom only his wealth had heretofore entitled him to ingress. And money—even _his_ money—had failed to act as _open sesame_. But surely as father-in-law to a prince—— Even the very patent fiasco attendant on his one effort to use this relationship as a master key to the portals of society had not wholly discouraged him. Later, when, practically by acclamation, he should have won the Governorship, and when the Princess d’Antri’s European triumphs should be noised abroad in Granite, surely _then_——