On one of these many trips to New York, Miss Delaware had been alone in her apartments at the hotel for most of the afternoon. In the evening, before the dinner hour, she was summoned to meet Mr. Rawn in one of the hotel parlors. At once she noted his suppressed excitement. He scarce could wait until they were alone, in a far corner of the room, before explaining to her the cause. "I don't like to say this, Miss Delaware," he began, "but I've got to do it!" "What do you mean, Mr. Rawn?" she replied in her usual low and clear tones. "There's been talk!" "Talk? About what?" "Us!" "About us? What can you mean, Mr. Rawn?" she asked. "The world is so confoundedly small, my dear girl, that it seems everything you do is known by everybody else. Of course, a man like myself is in the public eye; but we've always minded our business, and it ought not to have been anybody else's business beyond that." "You disturb me, Mr. Rawn! What has happened?" "--But now, to-night, now--just a little while ago--I met this fellow Ackerman--you know him--big man in the company--used to be general traffic manager down in St. Louis, on the old railroad where I began--well, he was drunk, and he talked." "What could he say?" "He got me by the coat collar and proceeded to tell me how much--how much--well, to tell the truth, he connected your name and mine. If he wasn't drunk--and a director--I'd go down there yet and smash his face for him! What business was it of his? Of course, men don't mind such things so much. But when it comes to you--why, my dear girl!" VIII The truth has already been stated regarding John Rawn; that, batrachian, half-dormant for almost half a century, and then putting into business what energy most men put into love and sex, he had passed a life of singular innocence, or ignorance, as to womankind. He had never countenanced much gossip about women, because he had little interest in the topic. The _grande passion_ marks most of us for its own now and again, or is to be feared now and again; but the _grande passion_ had passed by John Rawn. He was now approaching fifty years of age. Married he had been, and divorced; but he had not yet been in love. He now spoke to his like, his mate in the hunt, of the opposite sex, a young woman who at that very moment was as beautiful a creature as might have been found on all Manhattan, a woman known in all Manhattan now as the mysterious "Lady of the Lightnings," the goddess of the stock certificates of one of the most mammoth American corporations, a creature over whom Manhattan's most critical libertines were crazed--and helpless; moreover, a woman who, out of all those in the great _caravanserai_ at that moment, might as well as any have been chosen as the very type of gentle breeding and of gentle womanhood alike. But she had not yet been in love. IX