Mr. Belcher’s addresses to himself were growing less frequent among the excitements of new society.  He had enough to occupy his mind without them, and found sufficient competition in the matter of dress to modify in some degree his vanity of person; but the present occasion was a stimulating one, and one whose excitements he could not share with another.

His missive went to its destination, and performed a thoroughly healthful work, because it destroyed all hope of any relief from his hands, and betrayed the cruel contempt with which he regarded his old townsmen and friends.

He slept as soundly that night as if he had been an innocent infant; but on the following morning, sipping leisurely and luxuriously at his coffee, and glancing over the pages of his favorite newspaper, he discovered a letter with startling headings, which displayed his own name and bore the date of Sevenoaks.  The “R” at its foot revealed Dr. Radcliffe as the writer, and the peppery doctor had not miscalculated in deciding that “The New York Tattler” would be the paper most affected by Mr. Belcher—­a paper with more enterprise than brains, more brains than candor, and with no conscience at all; a paper which manufactured hoaxes and vended them for news, bought and sold scandals by the sheet as if they were country gingerbread, and damaged reputations one day for the privilege and profit of mending them the next.

He read anew, and with marvelous amplification, the story with which the letter of his agent had already made him familiar.  This time he had received a genuine wound, with poison upon the barb of the arrow that had pierced him.  He crushed the paper in his hand and ascended to his room.  All Wall street would see it, comment upon it, and laugh over it.  Balfour would read it and smile.  New York and all the country would gossip about it.  Mrs. Dillingham would peruse it.  Would it change her attitude toward him?  This was a serious matter, and it touched him to the quick.

The good angel who had favored him all his life, and brought him safe and sound out of every dirty difficulty of his career, was already on his way with assistance, although he did not know it.  Sometimes this angel had assumed the form of a lie, sometimes that of a charity, sometimes that of a palliating or deceptive circumstance; but it had always appeared at the right moment; and this time it came in the form of an interviewing reporter.  His bell rang, and a servant appeared with the card of “Mr. Alphonse Tibbets of ‘The New York Tattler.’”

A moment before, he was cursing “The Tattler” for publishing the record of his shame, but he knew instinctively that the way out of his scrape had been opened to him.