Jock was smiling his charming, boyish smile.

“Lead me to your north light,” he laughed at Von Herman.  “Got any Robert W. Chambers’s heroines tucked away there?”

Hupp’s broad hand came down on his shoulder with a thwack.  “That’s the spirit, McChesney!  That’s the—­” He stopped, abruptly.  “Say, are you related to Mrs. Emma McChesney, of the Featherloom Skirt Company?”

“Slightly.  She’s my one and only mother.”

“She—­you mean—­her son!  Well I’ll be darned!” He held out his hand to Jock.  “If you’re a real son of your mother I wish you’d just call the office boy as you step down the hall with Von Herman and tell him to bring me a hammer and a couple of spikes.  I’d better nail down my desk.”

“I’ll promise not to crowd you for a year or two,” grinned Jock from the doorway, and was off with the pleased Von Herman.

Past the double row of beehives again, into the elevator, out again, up a narrow iron stairway, into a busy, cluttered, skylighted room.  Pictures, posters, photographs hung all about.  Some of the pictures Jock recognized as old friends that had gazed familiarly at him from subway trains and street cars and theater programmes.  Golf clubs, tennis rackets, walking sticks, billiard cues were stacked up in corners.  And yet there was a bare and orderly look about the place.  Two silent, shirt-sleeved men were busy at drawing boards.  Through a doorway beyond Jock could see others similarly engaged in the next room.  On a platform in one corner of the room posed a young man in one of those costumes the coat of which is a mongrel mixture of cutaway and sack.  You see them worn by clergymen with unsecular ideas in dress, and by the leader of the counterfeiters’ gang in the moving pictures.  The pose was that met with in the backs of magazines—­the head lifted, eyes fixed on an interesting object unseen, one arm crooked to hold a cane, one foot advanced, the other trailing slightly to give a Fifth Avenue four o’clock air.  His face was expressionless.  On his head was a sadly unironed silk hat.

Von Herman glanced at the drawing tacked to the board of one of the men.  “That’ll do, Flynn,” he said to the model.  He glanced again at the drawing.  “Bring out the hat a little more, Mack.  They won’t burnish it if you don’t,”—­to the artist.  Then, turning about, “Where’s that girl?”

From a far corner, sheltered by long green curtains, stepped a graceful almost childishly slim figure in a bronze-green Norfolk suit and close-fitting hat from beneath which curled a fluff of bright golden hair.  Von Herman stared at her.

“You’re not the girl,” he said.  “You won’t do.”

“You sent for me,” retorted the girl.  “I’m Miss Michelin—­Gelda Michelin.  I posed for you six months ago, but I’ve been out of town with the show since then.”

Von Herman, frowning, opened a table drawer, pulled out a card index, ran his long fingers through it and extracted a card.  He glanced at it, and then, the frown deepening, read it aloud.