"No, at Robert Lloyd. What’s he doing in these diggings, anyhow? Why, he’s a regular pale-face. If he’s the new man—you know the kind—the kind that won’t kiss a girl in the dark without first asking her permission—then give me the old Nick." "Don’t blame it all on poor Cato," Cornelia intervened. Cornelia Covert was about thirty, blonde, loose-framed and of medium height. Her rich golden hair sounded a dominant note of which her pupils and her eyebrows were overtones. A firm, square chin heightened an illusion of strength with which her form invested her, but which her pale coloring and listless eye did not support. "Claude sided with the strait-laced party, too," she reminded Mazie. "Oh, well," said Claude, flushing slightly, "I’m really quite glad that the minority lost. To tell the truth, what I chiefly objected to was Hutchins Hurley’s cockiness. Personally I prefer a masked ball. I haven’t got Robert’s interest in backing the radicals or keeping their reputation spotless. Let’s risk it, I say. It’s a case of nothing venture, nothing have, isn’t it?" "So Robert was the real leader of the rumpus all the time," said Cornelia, sweetly. "I thought so. Still, I’m free to say that I admire his courage in defying ’Big Burley.’ Especially when I think how afraid of Hutch all the Outlaws are." Claude rose to his full stature and walked to the head of the couch where he stood, handsome and commanding. "Am I afraid of him?" he asked, amused. "Well, you generally agree with him, Lothario." He received this jab with a smile. He supposed Cornelia to be speaking only of bodily fear, and as his physical courage and strength were unusual, the shaft glanced off. "I mean," said Cornelia, "that, like Big Burley, you are an anarchist at heart, only not such a wicked one. You work within the law, he works without." Claude was preparing a vigorous assault on any theory that placed Burley and himself in the same class, when a ring at the outer door took the opportunity away. *CHAPTER TWO* *I* That part of the city of New York which the older charts describe as Kips Bay, now encompasses the East Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. It is a section of Manhattan famous in song and story. Here in 1635 came Jacobus Kip, the learned Dutch patroon and, with bricks brought from Holland, built a farmhouse on land where St. Gabriel’s Park and an astonishingly well-stocked library now flourish. Here Washington had another site for his movable headquarters while, on the heights of Murray Hill hard by, he rallied his troops against the redcoats. Here in Artillery Park (at First Avenue and Forty-fifth Street), Nathan Hale was executed. And here at Turtle Bay (where the East Forties now end) the "Quality" had a fashionable bathing beach in the early eighteen-hundreds.