A lovely Napoleon, she rallied her hosts in a changed strategy of audacious energy; she chose her own battle-grounds and vastly outnumbered her enemy at every point of concentration. It was a war to the knife. Through unknown agents, the Lady of Lakemere had deftly captured the best box in the Horse Show, and eke the same in the Canine Exposition. She had ensnared the one most eligible Opera box upon which Mrs. Alida Hathorn doted, and then, drawing to her splendid halls the most desirable men to battle over, Mrs. Willoughby easily attracted a crowd of bright-eyed beauties there ready to struggle for their selected “eligibles,” “notables,” and desirables. There was music and laughter, the gleam of tender eyes, the sheen of white shoulders, the glow of ivory bosoms, and all the magnetic thrill of rich young womanhood pervading the Circassia. It was no secret that a house party of forty would keep a “merry Christmas” at Lakemere, and, all in vain, did Alida Hathorn strive to secure the most sparkling pendants of the “inner fringe” for the widely thrown open doors of Oakwood. Her Indian summer antagonist was an easy victor. Some merry, audacious devil seemed to have roused himself in Elaine Willoughby’s bosom, and she was boldly _lancée_ now. Knowing well what a woman’s war to the finish means, the sly Elaine drew off with her varied and sumptuous entertainments all the desirable men and Beauty’s beautiful Cossacks soon swooped down upon them. Only Vreeland could trace Senator Alynton’s influence in the vastly enlarged glittering circle of foreign diplomats and well accredited European visitors of rank. The Army and Navy gallantly charged upon the battalions of Mother Eve’s fairest forlorn hope, and humble but effective ammunition—the canvas-back duck, the terrapin of our beloved land, choicest wines, chilled and warmed in the right order—did all the execution possible. The delicately ordered beaufets were a “continuous performance” to a star engagement. And, by a rare self-command, the warring woman with difficulty refrained from all open attacks upon the Hathorns, but yet deftly drawing the “financial swells” to her side by the generally accepted conclusion that there had been something wrong with Hathorn & Potter. No one suspected the genial James of intermeddling. He had reached no further point in his voyage to Samarcand, or Swat, than gay Villefranche. On his cozy yacht, the guileless Potter learned that Miss Dickie Doubleday, who had returned all of his “burning letters,” but, none of the sparkling votive diamonds, had dashingly captured and cut out a Western mining man of untold millions who guilelessly had drifted under her guns from a “star” of the Metropolitan opera. And, the festive Miss Dickie was now in the seventh heaven.