“I hope you will come in with us, Vreeland,” cordially remarked Potter. “Hathorn tells me that you are well up in stocks and as quick as lightning. I wouldn’t mind helping you to an interest. I must escape this—this—” The puzzled little millionaire paused, for the first word was a misfit, and he was a good devil at heart. He could not abuse the tantalizing Miss Dickie Doubleday. With a fine discrimination, the rising social star was touched with one pang of regret at the little man’s agony, now impaled on the hook of Miss Dickie Doubleday’s angle. He visited that bright-eyed young Ithuriel, and soon effected a “_modus vivendi_” which enabled Potter to cruise around on his yacht for one month of blessed and unhoped for peace. In several sittings upon the “Nixie,” Mr. Harold Vreeland relieved his grateful host of some fourteen thousand dollars, by the application of the neat little Western device known as “the traveling aces.” But, James Potter, grateful to the core, and lulled by the insidious Pommery, never “caught on,” and cheerfully “cashed up” without a murmur. From this victorious encounter, Mr. Harold Vreeland gaily returned to Lakemere, after a brief tour of inspection of the seaside resorts sacred to the _gente fina_. He found everything “grist to his mill.” The gates were widely ajar. With the patient assiduity of a well-conceived purpose, he now began to make the most of this “one summer.” He was well aware, from the reports of the complacent Justine, that the Conyers were both out of the way, and his heart bounded with delight as he realized that Elaine Willoughby gracefully called him to her side on those four days of the week when Hiram Endicott was not in commune with her, in the splendid gray stone mansion bowered in its nodding trees. He always paid her the delicate compliment of an implicit obedience, and in all the days of absence found the way made smooth for him elsewhere. The circle at Lakemere was a large one, and Mr. Harold Vreeland, “with an equal splendor” and a touch “impartially tender,” became the favorite _ami de maison_. He failed not, however, to spread the balm of his cordial suavity on every side. Day after day drifted happily by, the unspoken pact between the new friends becoming a stronger bond with every week, and the watchful vigilance of the young adventurer was never relaxed. He was now grounded on society’s shores as a fixture, and apparently serenely unconscious, soon became the _vogue_ without effort. The useless accomplishments of his college days now all came back to vastly aid the agreeable _parvenu_. He had early mastered the secret of womanhood—the vague dislike possessed by all of Eve’s charming daughters for the strong-souled and unyielding superior man. For, be they never so wary, “trifles light as air” happily fill up the days of those women to whom American luxury is both enfeebling and jading. The strong man is not needed in the feather-ball game of high life.