for me from Scott.  He says he’s plugging away at the Rose-beetle’s life history as a hors-d’oeuvre before tackling the appetising problem of his total extermination.  Dear old Scott!  I never thought that the boy I fought in your garden would turn into a spectacled savant.  Or that his sister would prove to be the only inspiration and faith and hope that life holds for me!

“I talked to Delancy.  He is a good young man, as you’ve always insisted.  I know one thing; he’s high-minded and gentle.  Dysart has a manner of treating him which is most offensive, but it only reflects discredit on Dysart.

“Delancy told me that Rosalie is hostess in her own cottage this month and has asked him up.  I heard him speaking rather diffidently to Dysart about it, and Dysart replied that he didn’t ’give a damn who went to the house,’ as he wasn’t going.

“So much for gossip; now a fact or two:  my father is plainly worried over the business outlook; and he’s quite alone in the house; and that is why I don’t go back to Roya-Neh just now and join your brother.  I could do plenty of work there.  Scott writes that the new studio is in good shape for me.  What a generous girl you are!  Be certain that at the very first opportunity I will go and occupy it and paint, no doubt, several exceedingly remarkable pictures in it which will sell for enormous prices and enable us to keep a maid-of-all-work when we begin our menage!

“Father has retired—­poor old governor—­it tears me all to pieces to
see him so silent and listless.  I am here at the club writing this
before I go home to bed.  Now I am going.  Good-night, my beloved.

“DUANE.”

“P.S.—­An honour, or the chance of it, has suddenly confronted me, surprising me so much that I don’t really dare to believe that it can possibly happen to me—­at least not for years.  It is this:  I met Guy Wilton the other day; you don’t know him, but he is a most charming and cultivated man, an engineer.  I lunched with him at the Pyramid—­that bully old club into which nothing on earth can take a man who has not distinguished himself in his profession.  It is composed of professional and business men, the law, the army, navy, diplomatic and consular, the arts and sciences, and usually the chief executive of the nation.

    “During luncheon Wilton said:  ’You ought to be in here.  You are the
    proper timber.’

    “I was astounded and told him so.

“He said:  ’By the way, the president of the Academy of Design is very much impressed with some work of yours he has seen.  I’ve heard him, and other artists, also, discussing some pictures of yours which were exhibited in a Fifth Avenue gallery.’

“Well, you know, Geraldine, the breath was getting scarcer in my lungs every minute and I hadn’t a word to say.  And do you know what that trump of a mining engineer did?