hands spread wide along the women’s upper vertebras, their partners looking into their intent faces from narrowed eyes. The picture was too bright, too varied, for the unaccustomed mind to seize it: Luke turned to Porcellis: "And Mrs. Ruysdael?" He was expecting his hostess to meet her guests at the door of the ballroom. Porcellis, however, did not wholly understand. "Oh, she’s about somewhere, I dare say," he responded—"though she doesn’t care for late hours and sometimes leaves after the third dance. Come on. I’ll introduce you to some worth-while people." He introduced Luke to a great many people, for he seemed to know them all. There was the British Ambassador and a German baron, a string of dowagers with marriageable daughters (Luke danced with each daughter and liked her), an artist, a scientist, and a bibliophile, and several debutantes that were not marriageable at all, but were quite frankly determined to marry. As is the way when a name runs in one’s brain, three out of five of the people that Luke talked to sooner or later mentioned the man that the elder Huber had spoken of that morning and that Porcellis had later so highly extolled. The Ambassador said that this man had, by lending or withholding tremendous sums, preserved the peace of nations; the artist praised him as the only true patron of art in America; the scientist told how the same man had established and equipped a now world-famous institution for the study and cure of a world-plague; the bibliophile envied his first editions and medieval manuscripts. Leading his prettiest partner across the floor, Luke’s glance, in spite of his will, rested on a diamond pendant that hung from a thread of gold about her neck and fell above her beautiful bust. She was a girl with the face of one of those Italian peasant girls that the early painters loved to paint as Madonnas, and Huber felt that his regard must be an insult. The girl, however, took the pendant between a white thumb and forefinger and looked from it to him with pleased eyes. "You like it?" she asked. "I think it’s wonderful," said he. "It is pretty," she replied. "My uncle gave it to me on my last birthday. It used to be in a heathen god’s crown in some Chinese or Hindu temple or other." "The god ought to be pleased to lose it to you," said Luke, "even if it didn’t come to you directly." "Oh, but it did come to me directly," she laughed prettily. "That’s half the charm of it. Uncle sent right over there and got it for me." When Luke found Porcellis again, he asked him about this. "Who’s that girl with the broad, low forehead," he inquired, "and the expression of a stained-glass saint?" "You’re aiming high," said Porcellis; "that’s one of the richest girls in New York." "Who’s her uncle?" "Ah, she’s been talking of him, has she? Well, I don’t blame her. Her uncle is the man I call the American Shakespeare. She’ll get a lot of his money, too, for he has no children of his own."