Enthusiastic guests made a punch. Fashionable young actors and actresses began to arrive. Hilarity waxed, impromptu speeches were made, songs rose on every key. Then suddenly some one ran up to the victrola and turned on the jazz; and in a twinkling the dining-room was deserted, furniture in the large room upstairs was pushed to the wall and the night entered on its last phase. Then only did Madame Zattiany signify her intention of retiring, and Clavering, to whom such entertainments were too familiar to banish for more than a moment his heavy disquiet, hastened to her side with a sigh of relief and a sinking sensation behind his ribs. Madame Zattiany made her farewells not only with graciousness but with unmistakable sincerity in her protestations of having passed her "most interesting evening in New York." Miss Dwight went up to the dressing-room with her, and Clavering, retrieving hat and top-coat, waited for her at the front door. She came down radiant and talking animatedly to her hostess; but when they had parted and she was alone with Clavering her face seemed suddenly to turn to stone and her lids drooped. As she was about to pass him she shrank back, and then raised her eyes to his. In that fleeting moment they looked as when he had met them first: inconceivably old, wise, disillusioned. "Now for it," he thought grimly as he close