Miss Von der Ruysling whisked Miss Bedford of Bedford County up to restful regions upstairs.  When she came down, she put an oblong small pasteboard box into Pilkins’ hands.

“Your present,” she said, “that I am returning to you.”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” said Pilkins, with a sigh, “the woolly kitten.”

He left Clayton on a park bench, and shook hands with him heartily.

“After I get work,” said the youth, “I’ll look you up.  Your address is on your card, isn’t it?  Thanks.  Well, good night.  I’m awfully obliged to you for your kindness.  No, thanks, I don’t smoke.  Good night.”

In his room, Pilkins opened the box and took out the staring, funny kitten, long ago ravaged of his candy and minus one shoe-button eye.  Pilkins looked at it sorrowfully.

“After all,” he said, “I don’t believe that just money alone will—­”

And then he gave a shout and dug into the bottom of the box for something else that had been the kitten’s resting-place—­a crushed but red, red, fragrant, glorious, promising Jacqueminot rose.

IV

THE ENCHANTED PROFILE

There are few Caliphesses.  Women are Scheherazades by birth, predilection, instinct, and arrangement of the vocal cords.  The thousand and one stories are being told every day by hundreds of thousands of viziers’ daughters to their respective sultans.  But the bowstring will get some of ’em yet if they don’t watch out.

I heard a story, though, of one lady Caliph.  It isn’t precisely an Arabian Nights story, because it brings in Cinderella, who flourished her dishrag in another epoch and country.  So, if you don’t mind the mixed dates (which seem to give it an Eastern flavour, after all), we’ll get along.

In New York there is an old, old hotel.  You have seen woodcuts of it in the magazines.  It was built—­let’s see—­at a time when there was nothing above Fourteenth Street except the old Indian trail to Boston and Hammerstein’s office.  Soon the old hostelry will be torn down.  And, as the stout walls are riven apart and the bricks go roaring down the chutes, crowds of citizens will gather at the nearest corners and weep over the destruction of a dear old landmark.  Civic pride is strongest in New Bagdad; and the wettest weeper and the loudest howler against the iconoclasts will be the man (originally from Terre Haute) whose fond memories of the old hotel are limited to his having been kicked out from its free-lunch counter in 1873.

At this hotel always stopped Mrs. Maggie Brown.  Mrs. Brown was a bony woman of sixty, dressed in the rustiest black, and carrying a handbag made, apparently, from the hide of the original animal that Adam decided to call an alligator.  She always occupied a small parlour and bedroom at the top of the hotel at a rental of two dollars per day.  And always, while she was there, each day came hurrying to see her many men, sharp-faced, anxious-looking, with only seconds to spare.  For Maggie Brown was said to be the third richest woman in the world; and these solicitous gentlemen were only the city’s wealthiest brokers and business men seeking trifling loans of half a dozen millions or so from the dingy old lady with the prehistoric handbag.