“Come into the library, Harriet,” he said, “while I smoke just one more cigar.” The smile on her face vanished, and lines of fatigue formed around her mouth. “Please excuse me,” she murmured in a weary tone. “I am very tired. They encored my cradle-song so many times that--that, really, it wearied me. I fear I can’t stand success. Good-night. I’m very sorry.” “Good-night,” he said coldly. Then he went to the library and moodily lighted a “perfecto.” There seemed to be something lacking in his life, something that forever seemed within his grasp and forever escaped him. CHAPTER III. “Yes, Richard,” remarked Fenton, as the two strangely-assorted newspaper men turned into a down-town side-street to take a _table d’hôte_ dinner at a restaurant well known to the semi-Bohemians of the city,--real Bohemians we have none, though another generation will beget them,--“yes, my boy, this is the most interesting metropolis in the world.” He hesitated a moment, and taking Richard by the arm, stood still and looked about him at the passing throng. “Within a radius of half a mile, Richard, not only every nation, but nearly every tribe, religion, sect, family, and name that the world has ever known has its representation. See, there’s an Italian barber-shop across the street kept by a man named Cæsar. We are to dine at a French restaurant whose proprietor bears the historic family-name of Valois. I remember a few lines of an after-dinner poem one of the men in the office read last year at a journalistic banquet. It began:-- “‘Did you say there was no romance In a town that deftly blends, In a picturesque mosaic, All the Old World’s odds and ends? In a city where the scapegoats Of the older countries meet, ’Tis a crazy-quilt of nations That is seen upon the street.’” “It is, in a certain sense, the fact you have just touched upon that brought me here,” said Richard, as they seated themselves at a small table in a dining-room curiously decorated in black and white. Around them, seated in small groups, were men whose faces bore the European stamp. Here and there a young woman could be seen, smiling over her claret at her _vis-à-vis_, her white teeth making her dark eyes more striking by contrast. There was nothing distinctly American in the scene, excepting a small, active, little newsboy, who rushed from table to table selling the evening edition of the _Trumpet_, and requesting patronage in a voice that indicated an ancestral brogue. Fenton, however, soon added one more native feature to the picture by ordering a Manhattan cocktail from a waiter who looked as though he might be a pretender to the throne of France, and sipping it slowly as he waited for Stoughton to explain himself.