Estelle’s opera party that next evening was a great success. Jimmy found himself, to his great surprise, liking Estelle. She was different from any girl he had ever met. She made him feel small and inadequate, somehow, and he knew he would never quite lose the awe she inspired in him. But he liked her. Estelle, on her part, liked Jimmy, mostly because it enhanced her own self-importance to feel how she must appear to him. And so, on the surface at least, they got along famously. During the opera Jimmy’s mind, in spite of, his efforts, wandered from the stage. He found himself once looking back over his shoulder at the wonderful “horse-shoe” over his head—that long, curving line of boxes where the most brilliant ladies of the world’s greatest city were sitting now. In the dim light he could see the little spots of color that marked them. The great, crowded auditorium awed him a little; and he felt, too, a curious exaltation that he should be there—Jimmy Rand, of the Fallon Brothers Mine, a part of all this splendor. He wished Anne could be with him, or could see him there, in his black evening clothes sitting between these two dainty girls. It seemed to symbolize success to Jimmy. He _was_ a success; he _was_ going up the ladder—making himself into somebody. He was conscious of a vague pride in what he had achieved already, and he would have liked Anne to have seen this tangible evidence of it, so that she might be proud, too. It never occurred to Jimmy that the sight of him at that moment would have caused Anne any pain. Her letters to him had always been so tenderly proud of his great accomplishments. She was always so interested and pleased at his accounts of the things he did. When he had seen her the last time, hardly a month before, Jimmy had not noticed, nor would he have understood, the new, wistful look that was in her eyes when she had told him timidly that he was “growing up into a—a real gentleman.” Nor did he ever know that she cried over many of his letters before she sat down bravely to answer them. Jimmy would have liked Anne to have seen him this night at the opera. He wrote her a glowing account of it the very next day. And little Anne replied that she was very glad, and proud of him; and in a postscript added simply: “I got the story of ‘La Bohéme’ out of the library, and I read it, and I like it very much.” The pathos of which was entirely lost to Jimmy. * * * * * In the office the following Monday morning George Cooper came to Jimmy in great excitement. “You were right to be afraid of this guy, Hope,” he announced without preface. “I just found out—quite by accident—he’s bought himself a coal property up near Scranton.” “What—”