Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Caesars had been driven mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West, been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day, rich. He wondered if-- But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile. "No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds queer, I know----" "Sounds! Sounds----" "But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll explain--later." "You can't," said Holt. "Can't what?" "Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy himself." Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction. "Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry. She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain of her social position as was proper for a woman of moderate antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which tradition demanded. Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in reply, bowed and said nothing. "Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down." Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been intellectually disappointed. To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him. There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length Holt, still in terror, blundered forward. "Miss Muriel----" he began.