"'Bojo, you must marry Doris,' she said brokenly" _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE "'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'" 40 "'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men some day!'" 104 "'Drina, dear child,' he said in a whisper" 144 "The message was the end of hope" 158 "'What does all the rest amount to?' she said breathlessly. 'I want you'" 208 "'He wants to see you now,' she said" 268 "'Your promise. No one is to know what I do'" 292 CHAPTER I THE ARRIVAL Toward the close of a pleasant September afternoon, in one of the years when the big stick of President Roosevelt was cudgeling the shoulders of malefactors of great wealth, the feverish home-bound masses which poured into upper Fifth Avenue with the awakening of the electric night were greeted by the strangest of all spectacles which can astound a metropolitan crowd harassed by the din of sounds, the fret and fury of the daily struggle which is the tyranny of New York. A very young man, of clean-cut limbs and boyish countenance, absolutely unhurried amidst the press, without a trace of preoccupation, worry, or painful mental concentration, was swinging easily up the Avenue as though he were striding among green fields, head up, shoulders squared like a grenadier, without a care in the world, so visibly delighted at the novelty of gay crowds, of towering buildings decked in electric garlands, of theatric shop-windows, that more than one perceiving this open enthusiasm smiled with a tolerant amusement. Now when a young man appears thus on Fifth Avenue, undriven, without preoccupation, without a contraction of the brows and particularly without that strained metropolitan gaze of trying to decide something of importance, either he is on his way to the station with a coveted vacation ahead or he has been in the city less than twenty-four hours. In the present instance the latter hypothesis was true.