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cautious strain in his ancestry and he visited many attractive suites before he decided on what he wanted. There was a wealthy young man whose unsympathetic father insisted he should rough it on the western plains for a year as an antidote for an enervating existence in New York. These rooms were to be sublet, furniture and all, and into them without effort Horace Blackwell came. He felt it a piece of amazing luck, for he was enabled to take young Worthington’s Japanese valet—a model of silence, courtesy and discretion—and start his career as a man about town within a week of leaving his home.

And so soon as his address had been determined upon he had cards engraved. One reading them would see that Mr. Horace Blackwell’s addresses were Marshfield, Erie County, N. Y., and such-and-such a number Fifth Avenue. Marshfield was legitimately his. When he came to read the title deeds to his aunt’s house he found it was described therein as Marshfield. That it was situate in the town of Bowlerville was information none need know.

Worthington’s rooms were a little too well furnished. The criticism that the old vulgarian Gloster, of Kipling’s poem, passed on his son’s rooms at college could have been as well exercised on these furnished by the decadent son of a great ironmaster. At that time Blackwell had not made the discovery that he possessed naturally good taste. There were oriental hangings, for example, that Worthington had bought at great cost because he was assured they had decorated the apartments of a sultan’s favorite wife. The paintings that he had most admired were of Boucher and his pink and white school of vulgar superficiality. But Blackwell did not like to banish them at first, having no standards of art from which to judge them.

The most important morning of his life dawned with no especial radiance. He was intoxicated with the ease and luxury of his life. At a time when he would formerly have been an hour in the accounting room of the Bowlerville mill, Ito brought him delicious tea and the thinnest of bread and butter and asked him at what hour the bath should be ready and what he desired for break- fast. All his life Horace had wanted pajamas of real silk and bath and dressing robes of delicate texture. They were his now and stamped with the name of a fashionable retailer. The pleasant spring breezes came stealing into his room over window boxes of bright flowers.

The touch of caution in him brought the knowledge that men about town may not indefinitely prolong an existence on twelve thousand dollars; but his money was hardly touched and the life of which he had dreamed lay before him. He had rooms on the Avenue and to them would come no pestering friends of other days. His life had always been a self-centered one. Effie Horton alone knew him well, and she was even now striving with the dull daughters of one of Buffalo’s proudest families. Adventures were for the bold. If he had not possessed a faith in his destiny he might well have wondered by what path he should proceed. To take off his hat to a pleasing damsel and try to convince her they had met before was no part of his scheme. Such coarse technique savored too much of the college-boy style to suit him. And once, long ago, he had tried it and not with eminent success.

As it chanced, he had invaded New York at a time when the International Polo matches were but a few weeks distant. Polo was a game he had never seen. He knew it was society’s sport, the costliest of outdoor exercises, the most splendid game in which physically fit humanity may engage. His first knowledge of it was gained by that best of polo pony stories, “The Maltese Cat,” and he had seen mentions of the game from time to time where fashionable America foregathered, Newport, Lakewood, Point Judith and Narragansett Pier.

Smart America had witnessed in the preceding year a very close contest for