“Yes, she is my first play. I must burn my ships and now go boldly in for ‘High Life.’ I’ll risk it. Carlisle said: ‘There are twenty millions of people in Britain—mostly fools.’ Among the gilded fools of Gotham, some one easy mark must be waiting for me on general principles. I’ll take the chances and play the queen for my whole stack of chips.” He wandered homeward, after narrowly inspecting the “Circassia,” and unconsciously attracting the attention of Daly, the Roundsman, the bravest and cheeriest member of the Tenderloin police. Lights still gleamed from a splendid second-floor apartment above him, where a lovely woman, royal in her autumnal beauty, gazed out at the night. Elaine Willoughby sighed as she turned away. “If I had told Hathorn all, he might have made me his wife. Alida—” Her face hardened as she choked down a sob. “My God! if I only knew! I must have Endicott renew his search.” In some strange way, the handsome Western stranger returned to haunt her disturbed mind. “He looks like a man brave, gallant, and tender,” she sighed, as she forgot Hathorn, who, in his bachelor apartments was now musing upon the ways and means to hold Elaine Willoughby’s heart after he had wedded Miss Millions. CHAPTER II. THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY. Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered on the fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s eastern wall of living green. New York was astir once more, and the daily burden of life settled down again upon myriads of galled shoulders. The rumbling trains had rattled away the blue-bearded mechanic, the pale-faced clerk, and the ferret-eyed anæmic shop girl to their daily “demnition grinds” long before Elaine Willoughby opened her eyes, in the Circassia. “A breeze of morning moved,” and down the Mall early pedestrians wandered, while the bridle bits rang out merrily on the park cantering paths. Sedentary citizens had strolled along into the leafy shades for a peep at a cherished book, or a glance at the horrible of horribles in the “New York Whirl,” while the recumbent tramp shook himself and hopefully scuttled forth from his grassy lair to search for vinous refreshment and to craftily elude the inexorable “sparrow cop.” New York City was awakened in the inverse order of rank, and the passion play of Gotham was on once more. The splintered lances danced over the fragrant God’s acres of the great pleasure ground to the palace on Central Park west, and as they were gaily reflected from a silver-framed Venetian mirror, they recalled Mrs. Wharton Willoughby to that luxurious life of Gotham in whose fierce splendors there is no rest. For as burning a flame throbs in the heated maelstrom of Manhattan as in any human eddy of the whole distracted globe.