Budd strolled thoughtfully along the avenue toward his favorite club. “She is mistaken about the age of miracles,” he was saying to himself. “There are amazing and inexplicable phenomena in sight all around us. A newspaper man who appears to advantage in a drawing-room! Is not that a miracle? And I even suspect that she admires him. It’s most incredible.” There was a great deal in the world that astonished Napoleon when he reached St. Helena and had time to sit down and think. * * * * * “Do you know anything of a man named John Fenton--a journalist, I believe?” asked Buchanan Budd of Percy-Bartlett when he reached the club. “Yes,” answered the latter. “Fenton belonged to our set years ago--before you entered it, you know. He’s a thoroughbred, but eccentric, and completely out of the running.” This answer did not tend to restore Budd’s disturbed equilibrium. He suspected that Percy-Bartlett underrated John Fenton’s staying powers. CHAPTER XIII. It was a bright moonlight night as John Fenton strode hurriedly away from the Van Vleck mansion, and bent his steps toward Richard Stoughton’s apartments. Just why, at such an hour, he had determined to call on his youthful friend, he could hardly say. He was discontented with himself and the world. He had had, in a certain sense, an enjoyable evening; but a man of Fenton’s age and mental tendencies does not make a radical change in his habits without a protest that finds expression in his actions. A broken piston-rod may not ruin an Atlantic liner, but it causes many eccentric variations in the vessel’s course. For ten years past John Fenton had been a man of somewhat questionable habits, and of distinctly iconoclastic convictions. He had discovered, of a sudden, that a change had crept over the details of his daily life, and that his iconoclasm was no longer followed by an exclamation point, but by an interrogation mark. What influence had been brought to bear to beget these changes, he was not sure. He realized that his intercourse with Richard Stoughton had had some effect upon his mode of life and cast of thought, but he had never acknowledged to himself that he had taken the young man _au sérieux_. That a rather superficial boy, not long out of college, could throw a man of Fenton’s age and character entirely out of time-worn grooves seemed to be an absurdity. But as Fenton strode down the avenue, so deep in self-communion that he noted not the beauty of the night, he realized that influences he could not trace, and whose force he could not measure, had been at work to disturb the even tenor of his life, and to throw him back into that state of unrest and questioning that had agitated his existence before he had abandoned, as he fondly thought forever, the ambitions that the average man cherishes.