Good-natured Tom did not care a picayune with whom he talked or sat, so long as he knew he was to dine at Schuyler Hill, and see Gertie with the wonderful eyes and hair, and the shy drooping of her lids and the bright color coming and going in her face just as it did when she told him there was no hope, but bade him be a man all the same for her sake and the sake of the fair girl he would find some day to take her place in his heart. Tom knew he shouldn’t find the girl, but he was trying to be a man, and even Julia Schuyler tolerated him now, and divided her coquetries between him and Robert Macpherson, who was unusually quiet and studied the scenery from the window more than he did the dark, handsome face beside him. Alice was satisfied to talk with Godfrey, and no one in the car who watched her could help guessing what he was to her, or that she was more delighted with the state of affairs than he. Alice was not Godfrey’s choice, though he was engaged to her, and had been for four days, during which time she had made the most of her new dignity, and shown her lover to as many of her friends as possible, and chosen her own engagement ring, and looked at a corner house far up town, which she wished Godfrey to secure at any cost, as her heart was set upon it. And Godfrey acquiesced in everything, and got the refusal of the house, and went with her to look at some rare bronzes and a $5,000 painting, on which her heart was also set, and played the devoted lover as well as he could, with no shadow of genuine love in the whole affair so far as he was concerned. How he came to be engaged he hardly knew, except that his father desired it, while Alice herself expected it, and people had talked of it so long that he had gradually come to consider it as something he must take as a matter of course, just as he took the measles, and the mumps, and the chicken-pox. And yet it was very sudden at the last. “A word and a blow,” he said to Robert, who asked why he looked so white when, after the deed was done, he went to call on his friend at the hotel. “White,” Godfrey replied. “I guess you’d be white, too, if you’d been and gone and got engaged as I have! Why, Bob, I feel as I did when I was a little shaver, and swallowed a rusty copper, and Aunt Christine slapped me on the back, till the copper flew half way across the room, and I was black as your hat. I say, Bob, hit me a cut or two, and see if I can’t throw this up.” With a merry laugh Robert replied: “I don’t believe you’ll throw up thirty thousand a year as easily as you did the rusty copper; but tell me about it. How did it happen, and when?”