All day, Frederick Hathorn secretly tormented himself over the curt answer, “Will be there. Vreeland.” There was much before the tortured bridegroom to arrange. The mutinous Dickie Doubleday, phantom of audacious and unrestful beauty, was now driving Mr. James Potter out of his wits. He longed for a “boat upon the shore and a bark upon the sea!” He had learned that in some distant Afghan hole called “Swat,” there were neither post-offices, telegraphs, banks, detectives, song and dance theatres, nor any of the machinery of a “bastard civilization” which the reckless Miss Dickie could work to ensnare or follow him. “By Gad! Just the place! I’ll get a white shirt—brown myself up like parched coffee, and turn into a Ghazi, or Dervish, or fighting Mollah—or, any old thing. She is a hummer. Pray God, that some other good-looking fellow will soon catch her ‘wandering eye.’ Her constancy is an ‘abnormal feature’ of later development. This is the only time in her life that she has stuck to a victim—for over three months. Other fellows should help me bear the burden.” There was all the details of Hathorn’s newly enhanced social state to arrange. The Union and Metropolitan clubs were to be haunt of Benedick—the married man. And—the war to the knife, the fight of Marius and Sylla now lay before him. There was Oakwood, his wife’s magnificent place at Ashmont, awaiting its social _monture_. Her Imperious Ladyship Alida had ordered him to go in for the pennant-bearing honors of Vice Commodore of the Ashmont Yacht Club, and her beautiful schooner, “L’Allouette,” was awaiting his practical hand. A positive mandate for the best box at the Horse Show, and a royal gallery box in the tiara-wearing tier of the Opera, were matters of pressing urgency. Hathorn was already “broken in” as a “general advance agent” and “heavy man” for his wife’s “Great Moral Matrimonial Show,” and that lady, with the coming Hathorn-Willoughby feud first in her mind, had brought luggage enough for Cleopatra and all her nymphs on that record-breaking voyage of splendor to the Cydnus. All these and many more things busied the disgruntled Hathorn until the hour set for the meeting with Vreeland. He had posted his wife and her train away up to the Buckingham, for he felt, instinctively, that the handsome groomsman was not just the party to linger around his newly-enclosed sheepfold. He had already discovered several shades of color in his rosebud not visible to the ante-nuptial eye, and, moreover, he was hungry for news of Elaine Willoughby and of her state of mind. He now saw the “firm’s” interests seriously endangered. There was the vastly profitable past business connection, and “Sugar,” too, loomed up before him now as a vanishing pyramid of alluring sweetness. He knew that the woman whom he had coldly left had been the very spirit of his own wonderful success.