“Dear Max: 

“I hope you will be pleasantly surprised to find that Mother and I are staying in this hotel.  I find New York more wonderful but more unfriendly than I had been told, and I want terribly to see a familiar face.  Won’t you look us up as soon as you can?

“Yours as ever,

“DOROTHY.”

He went to the telephone, found that she was in and immediately arranged that she should go out to lunch with him.

All the morning and some of the night, he had been engaged in the composition of a letter to Dorothy Lane.  Theirs was an old and sentimental friendship, which adverse circumstances might have ended, or favoring circumstances have changed into love.  As things were, it seemed to be tending toward their marriage without any whirlwind rapidity.

There was no doubt he was very glad to see her, as he hurried her into a taxicab, and told the man to drive to the restaurant of the hour.  She was very neatly and nicely dressed in a tailor-made costume for which she had just paid twice as much as a native New York woman would have paid.  In fact she was an essentially neat and nice little person.  They talked both at once like two children about all the people at home, until they were actually seated at table, and lunch was ordered.  Then Riatt made up his mind he must take the plunge.

“Dolly,” he said, “do I look as if something tremendous had just happened?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve invented a submarine, or something?”

“No, this is something of a more personal nature.”

“Oh, Max, you’ve fallen in love?”

A waiter rushing up with rolls and butter suggested that Madame probably preferred fresh butter to salted, before Riatt answered:  “No, that is just what I haven’t done—­and that’s the secret, Dolly.  I’m not a bit in love, but I am engaged to be married.”

“Max!  But why if—­”

“I’ll tell you on the second of March.  It’s a good story.  You’ll enjoy it, but for the present, my dear, you must just accept the fact that I am engaged, that I am neither wildly elated nor unduly depressed.”

Miss Lane had grown extremely serious.  “Who is she?” she asked.

“Her name is Christine Fenimer.”

“I’ve seen her name in the papers.”

“Who has not?” he returned bitterly.

“What is she like?”

Riatt felt some temptation to answer truthfully and say:  “She is designing, mercenary, hard-hearted and as beautiful as a goddess.”  But he did not, and, as he paused he saw the head waiter spring forward from the doorway, smiling and holding up a pencil to attract the attention of some underling, and then he saw that Christine, Hickson and Mr. and Mrs. Linburne were being ushered in.  Christine approached, tall, beautiful, conspicuous, and as divinely unconscious of it as Adam and Eve of their nakedness; she moved between the tables, bowing here and there to people she knew, not purposely ignoring all others, but seeming to find them invisible as thin air.  Riatt watched as if she were some great spectacle, and was recalled only by hearing Dorothy’s voice saying: