“My friends here, stimulated by Dorothy Lane’s ravishing description of you, have asked many times to see your picture. I am ashamed of my own carelessness in having gone away without obtaining one for exhibition purposes. Will you send me one at once? One not already in circulation among poets and painters. I will set it on my writing table, and allow my eyes to stray sentimentally toward it whenever I have people to dinner. “By the way, the day I left New York I told a florist to send you flowers every day. We worked out quite an elaborate scheme for every day in the week. Did he ever do it? “Yours, at least in the sight of this company, “MAX RIATT.” In answer to this, he was surprised by a telegram: “So sorry for absurd mistake. Entirely misunderstood source of the flowers. Enjoy them a great deal more now. Yes, they come regularly. A thousand thanks. Am sending photograph by mail.” Riatt did not need to ask himself from whom she had imagined they came. Not the poet, unless magazine rates were rising unduly. Nor Hickson, who failed a little in such attentions. No, it was Linburne--and evidently Linburne’s attentions were taken so much as a matter of course, that she had not even thanked him, nor had he noticed her omission. He did not answer the telegram, nor did he acknowledge the photograph but, true to his word, he established it at once on his desk in a frame which he spent a long time in selecting. The picture represented Christine at her most queenly and unapproachable. She wore the black and gold dress, and the huge feather fan was folded across her bare arms. Every time he looked at it, he remembered how those same arms had been clasped round his own stiff and unbending neck. And sometimes he found the thought distracted his attention from important matters. It was about the middle of February when he received one morning a letter from Nancy Almar. He knew _her_ handwriting. She was always sending him little notes of one kind or another. This one was very brief. “Clever mouse! So it knew a way to get out all the time!” All day he speculated on the meaning of this strange message. Had Nancy discovered some proof of the nature of his engagement? Had Christine been moved by pity to tell Hickson the truth? On the whole he inclined to think that this was the explanation. The next day he knew he had been mistaken. He had a letter from Laura Ussher--not the first in the series--urging him to come back at once.