He shook his head.  “N—­no.  Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you and Undine will go steady for a while.”  He paused and looked across the room at his daughter’s door.  “Where is she—­out?”

“I guess she’s in her room, going over her dresses with that French maid.  I don’t know as she’s got anything fit to wear to that dinner,” Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

Mr. Spragg smiled at last.  “Well—­I guess she will have,” he said prophetically.

He glanced again at his daughter’s door, as if to make sure of its being shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say:  “I saw Elmer Moffatt down town to-day.”

“Oh, Abner!” A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs. Spragg.  Her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.

“Oh, Abner,” she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter’s door.  Mr. Spragg’s black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife.

“What’s the good of Oh Abner-ing?  Elmer Moffatt’s nothing to us—­no more’n if we never laid eyes on him.”

“No—­I know it; but what’s he doing here?  Did you speak to him?” she faltered.

He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets.  “No—­I guess Elmer and I are pretty well talked out.”

Mrs. Spragg took up her moan.  “Don’t you tell her you saw him, Abner.”

“I’ll do as you say; but she may meet him herself.”

“Oh, I guess not—­not in this new set she’s going with!  Don’t tell her anyhow.”

He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his arm.

“He can’t do anything to her, can he?”

“Do anything to her?” He swung about furiously.  “I’d like to see him touch her—­that’s all!”

II

Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.

She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective.  Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—­and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid Mrs. Fairford’s note before her, and began to study it minutely.  She had read in the “Boudoir Chat” of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and rather against her mother’s advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in silver.  It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram—­simply her address and telephone number.  It gave Undine