Whatever may have been my motive in dragging him into it, Jeffard's own reasons for going were confessedly experimental. So much he confided to me on our early retreat from the house of mirth. "I wanted to find out where I stand," he said, "and these good people have been quite explicit. Don't get me any more invitations." And after a time he added, "I can buy them when I want them." From which you will infer that he will henceforth sit in the seat of the scornful, and this, I fear, is the lamentable fact. Touching his present mode of life, it borders on the puzzling. With a bank deposit which is currently reported to reach seven figures, and which is doubtless well up in the sixes, he lives in two rooms in a block, and takes his meals at the club. A very rich spendthrift might do this, you will say, saving at the spigot and wasting at the bung; but so far as my observation goes, Jeffard seems not to know that his barrel has a bung. And if any of the staves have started on the side of dissipation, the leak is not yet apparent to me. The other evening, when I let drive a little arrow pointed with a gibe at his penuriousness, he laughed and reminded me of something he had said one night in the famine time when we were dining by the help of a small windfall of mine. "I told you I should be a miser if the tide ever turned," said he, "and you scoffed at me. I assure you I can account for every dollar I have spent since the Midas began to pour them in." This is his attitude as he defines it, but I can qualify the accusation a little on the friendly side. I should rather say that he had set his mark at thrifty frugality. He is not niggardly; in benevolences which may be paid for in the coin of effort he is still generous; and if he were living on a clerk's income people would commend him. But I fancy I hear you cry "Enough!" and this ends with the heartiest good wishes for you both. Faithfully yours, ROBERT LANSDALE. CHAPTER XXVIII LANSDALE had defined himself as a reporter on the "Coloradoan," but in reality he was rather more,--or less,--being that anomalous member of a newspaper staff known as the literary editor. Kershaw had taken him in doubtfully, and had afterward wondered why a man with such an evident gift for journalistic work should prefer to spend his days and nights writing stories which no one would buy. For, contrary to all precedent, when he could sink his literary ambitions the fictionist proved to be a general utility journalist of no uncertain ability, running the office gamut from proof-reading in an emergency to filling the editorial columns on the rare occasions when Kershaw was absent.