"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate your return to the companionship of genius." "The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact with each new guest. "Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked." The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler." But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her proteges with the Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed current. "Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts: "Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that they're not inordinately happy." Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness. It subsequently developed, in a tete-a-tete with the wife, that she had read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor. In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing and whom she captured she held in bondage. "Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time. Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold fish."