"There maybe a story there--who knows. Besides, it's directly on my way to the Globe, and the curtain is not until eight-thirty. Tell you what, old man; come along with me and see the thing to a finish. Fate leads a card--Mr. Esper Indiman's--and we'll play the second hand; what do you say?" I declined firmly. God forbid that I should be featured, along with the other exhibits in the case, on the first page of to-morrow's Planet. "So," he assented, indifferently, and pushed his chair back. "Well, I must push along--Lord! there's that copy--the old man will have it in for me good and plenty if I don't get it down in time. Adios!" He disappeared, and I let him depart willingly enough. Later on I went up to the library for a smoke--no fear of encountering any Jeckleys there, and, in fact, the room was entirely deserted. I looked at my watch; it was ten minutes after seven, and that gave me a quarter of an hour in which to think it over. Should I accept Mr. Indiman's invitation to call? I looked around for an ash-tray, and, seeing one on the big writing-table in the centre of the room, I walked over to it. There were some bits of white lying in the otherwise empty tray--the fragments of a torn-up visiting-card. A portion of the engraved script caught my eye, "Indi--" It was not difficult to piece together the bits of pasteboard, for I knew pretty well what I should find. Completed, the puzzle read, "Mr. Esper Indiman," and in pencil, "Call at 4020 Madison Avenue at half-past seven this evening." So there were three of us--if not more. Rather absurd this assignment of a separate quarter of an hour to each interview--quite as though Mr. Indiman desired to engage a valet and we were candidates for the position. Evidently, an eccentric person, but it's a queer world anyhow, as most of us know. There's my own case, for example. I'm supposed to be a gentleman of leisure and means. Leisure, certainly, but the means are slender enough, and proceeding in a diminishing ratio. That's the penalty of having been born a rich man's son and educated chiefly in the arts of riding off at polo and thrashing a single-sticker to windward in a Cape Cod squall. But I sha'n't say a word against the governor, God bless him! He gave me what I thought I wanted, and it wasn't his fault that an insignificant blood-clot should beat him out on that day of days--the corner in "R. P." It was never the Chicago crowd that could have downed him--I'm glad to remember that.