"I'm going to have my happiness, if I have to buy it," Van Buren muttered doggedly, as he crept into bed shortly after midnight. And then, tossing sleeplessly in his bed and at last rejoicing in the possession of his late father's millions to back him in his enterprise, he laid the foundations of a plan comparable only to that of the Wheat King who corners the market, or the man of Cotton who loads himself up with more bales of that useful commodity than all the fertile acres of the South could raise in seven seasons. Orders were despatched by wire and by mail to all the booksellers in the land whose names and addresses Van Buren could get hold of. Department stores were put under contribution and their stock commandeered, and one of the biggest booms in the whole history of literature set in. "The City of Credit" went into its second, fifth, twentieth, fiftieth large edition. Hutchins & Waterbury wrote Van Buren stating that a sudden turn in the market had made his book one of the six best sellers not only of this century but of all centuries. Their presses were seething to the point of white heat with the copies of "The City of Credit" needed to supply the demand; their binders were working day and night with a double force, and their shipping department was pretty nearly swamped with the strain put upon it. "Your royalty check on January 1st will be the fattest in the land," wrote Waterbury in a moment of enthusiasm. "We are thinking of sending our staff of readers to the lunatic asylum and getting an entirely new set. An order for four thousand has come in from Chicago this morning. St. Louis wants fifteen hundred, and pretty nearly every other able-bodied town in the country is asking for from one to one hundred and fifty." By Christmas time, if the publishers' announcements were to be believed, "The City of Credit" had attained to the enormous sale of three hundred and fifty thousand, and Van Buren was in receipt of a letter from a literary periodical asking for his photograph for publication in its February issue. This brought him a realization of the fact that he might now fairly claim to be considered a literary success. At any rate, he felt that he had now a right to approach Miss Tooker with a fair prospect of receiving from her a favorable answer to the question which she had a year before left an open one. And events showed that his feeling was justified, for two days later he enjoyed the blissful sensation of finding himself the accepted lover of the woman he had tried so hard to please. "Is it to be--yes?" he whispered, as they sat together in the conservatory of her father's city house. "It has--always been--yes," she replied softly, and then what happened is not for your eyes or mine. Suffice it to say that Van Buren moved immediately from sordid old New York to become a dweller in the higher altitudes of Elysium.