Best laid schemes

by Meredith Nicholson

I

Farrington read the note three times, fished the discarded envelope out of his wastepaper basket, scrutinized it thoroughly, and then addressed himself again to the neat vertical script. What he read was this:

If Mr. Farrington will appear at the Sorona Tea House, on Bayfield Road, near Corydon, at four o’clock today—Tuesday—the matter referred to in his reply to our advertisement may be discussed. We serve only one client at a time and our consultations are all strictly confidential.

The note was unsigned, and the paper, the taste and quality of which were beyond criticism, bore no address. The envelope had not passed through the post office, but had been thrust by a private messenger into the R.F.D. box at Farrington’s gate.

Laurance Farrington had been established in the Berkshires for a year, and his house in the hills back of Corydon, with the Housatonic tumbling through his meadow, had been much described in newspapers and literary journals as the ideal home for a bachelor author. He had remodeled an old farmhouse to conform to his ideas of comfort, and incidentally he maintained a riding horse, a touring car and a runabout; and he had lately set up an Airedale kennel.

He was commonly spoken of as one of the most successful and prosperous of American novelists. He not only satisfied the popular taste but he was on cordial terms with the critics. He was thirty-one, and since the publication of The Fate of Catherine Gaylord, in his twenty-fourth year, he had produced five other novels and a score or more of short stories of originality and power.

An enviable man was Laurance Farrington. When he went back to college for commencement he shared attention with presidents and ex-presidents; and governors of states were not cheered more lustily. He was considered a very eligible young man and he had not lacked opportunities to marry. His friends marveled that, with all his writing of love and marriage, he had never, so far as any one knew, been in love or anywhere near it.

As Farrington read his note in the quiet of his study on this particular morning it was evident that his good fortune had not brought him happiness. For the first time he was finding it difficult to write. He had begun a novel that he believed would prove to be the best thing he had done; but for three months he had been staring at blank paper. The plot he had relied on proved, the moment he began to fit its parts together, to be absurdly weak; and his characters had deteriorated into feeble, spineless creatures over whom he had no control. It was inconceivable that the mechanism of the imagination would suddenly cease to work, or that the gift of expression would pass from him without warning; and yet this had apparently happened.

Reading somewhere that Sir Walter Scott had found horseback riding stimulating to the imagination, he galloped madly every afternoon, only to return tired and idealess; and the invitations of his neighbors to teas and dinners had been curtly refused or ignored. It was then that he saw in a literary journal this advertisement:

Plots Supplied. Authors in need of assistance served with discretion. Address X Y Z, care of office, The Quill.

To put himself in a class of amateurs requiring help was absurd, but the advertisement piqued his curiosity. Baker, the editor of The Quill, wrote him just then to ask for an article on Tendencies in American Fiction; and in declining this commission Farrington subjoined a facetious inquiry as to the advertisement of X Y Z. In replying, Baker said that copy for the ad had been left at the business office by a stranger. A formal note accompanying it stated that a messenger would call later for answers.

“Of course,” the editor added jocularly, “this is only another scheme for extracting money from fledgling inkslingers—the struggling geniuses of Peoria and Ypsilanti. You’re a lucky dog to be able to sit on Olympus and look down at them.”

Farrington forced his unwilling pen to its task for another week, hoping to compel the stubborn fountains to break loose with their old abundance. His critical faculties were malevolently alert and keen, now that his creative sense languished. He hated what he wrote and cursed himself because he could do no better.

To add to his torture, the advertisement in The Quill recurred to him persistently, until, in sheer frenzy, he framed a note to X Y Z—an adroit feeler, which he hoped would save his face in case the advertisement had not been put forth in good faith.

Plots—he wrote—were the best thing he did; and as X Y Z seemed to be interested in the subject it might be amusing if not indeed profitable for them to meet and confer. This was the cheapest bravado; he had not had a decent idea of any sort for a year!

X Y Z was nothing if not prompt. The reply, naming the Sorona Tea House as a rendezvous, could hardly have reached him sooner; and the fact that it had been dipped into his mail box unofficially greatly stimulated his interest.

The Sorona Tea House stood on a hilltop two miles from Farrington’s home and a mile from Corydon, his post office and center of supplies. It had been designed to lure motorists to the neighborhood in the hope of interesting them in the purchase of property. It was off the main thoroughfares and its prosperity had been meager; in fact, he vaguely remembered that some one had told him the Sorona was closed. But this was not important; if closed it would lend itself all the better to the purposes of the conference.

He lighted his pipe and tramped over his fields with his favorite Airedale until luncheon. It was good to be out-doors; good to be anywhere, in fact, but nailed to a desk. The brisk October air, coupled with the prospect of finding a solution of his problems before the day ended, brought him to a better mood, and he sat down to his luncheon with a good appetite.

When three o’clock arrived he had experienced a sharp reaction. He was sure he was making a mistake; he was tempted to pack a suitcase and go for a weekend with some friends on Long Island who had been teasing him for a visit; but this would not be a decent way to treat X Y Z, who might be making a long journey to reach the tea house.

The question of X Y Z’s sex now became obtrusive. Was the plot specialist man or woman? The handwriting in the note seemed feminine and yet it might have been penned by a secretary. The use of our and we rather pointed to more than one person. Very likely this person who offered plots in so businesslike a fashion was a spectacled professor who had gone through all existing fiction, analyzing devices and making new combinations, and would prove an intolerable bore—a crank probably; possibly an old maid who had spent her life reading novels and was amusing herself in her old age by furnishing novelists with ideas. He smoked and pondered. He was persuaded that he had made an ass of himself in answering the advertisement and the sooner he was through with the business the better.

He allowed himself an hour to walk to the Sorona, and set off rapidly. He followed the road to the hilltop and found the tea house undeniably there.

The place certainly had a forsaken look. The veranda was littered with leaves, the doors and windows were closed, and no one was in sight. Depression settled on him as he noted the chairs and tables piled high in readiness for storing for the winter. He passed round to the western side of the house, and his heart gave a thump as he beheld a table drawn close to the veranda rail and set with a braver showing of napery, crystal and silver than he recalled from his few visits to the house in midsummer. A spirit lamp was just bringing the kettle to the boiling point: it puffed steam furiously. There were plates of sandwiches and cakes, cream and sugar, and cups—two cups!

“Good afternoon, Mr. Farrington! If you’re quite ready let’s sit down.”

He started, turned round and snatched off his hat.

A girl had appeared out of nowhere. She greeted him with a quick nod, as though she had known him always—as though theirs was the most usual and conventional of meetings. Then she walked to the table and surveyed it musingly.

“Oh, don’t trouble,” she said as he sprang forward to draw out her chair. “Let us be quite informal; and, besides, this is a business conference.”

Nineteen, he guessed—twenty, perhaps; not a day more. She wore, well back from her face, with its brim turned up boyishly, an unadorned black velvet hat. Her hair was brown, and wisps of it had tumbled down about her ears; and her eyes—they, too, were brown—a golden brown which he had bestowed on his favorite heroine. They were meditative eyes—just such eyes as he might have expected to find in a girl who set up as a plot specialist. There was a dimple in her right cheek. When he had dimpled a girl in a story he bestowed dimples in pairs. Now he saw the superiority of the single dimple, which keeps the interested student’s heart dancing as he waits for its appearance. Altogether she was a wholesome and satisfying young person, who sent scampering all his preconceived ideas of X Y Z.

“I’m so glad you were prompt! I always hate waiting for people,” she said.

“I should always have hated myself if I had been late,” he replied.

“A neat and courteous retort! You see the tea house is closed. That’s why I chose it. Rather more fun anyhow, bringing your own things.”

They were very nice things. He wondered how she had got them there.

“I hope,” he remarked leadingly, “you didn’t have to bring them far!”

She laughed merrily at his confusion as he realized that this was equivalent to asking her where she lived.

“Let’s assume that the fairies set the table. Do you take yours strong?”

He delayed answering that she might poise the spoonful of tea over the pot as long as possible. Hers was an unusual hand; in his tales he had tried often to describe that particular hand without ever quite hitting it. He liked its brownness—tennis probably; possibly she did golf too. Whatever sports she affected, he was quite sure that she did them well.

“I knew you would like tea, for the people in your novels drink such quarts; and that was a bully short story of yours, The Lost Tea Basket—killingly funny—the real Farrington cleverness!”

He blinked, knowing how dead the real Farrington cleverness had become. Her manner was that of any well-brought-up girl at a tea table, and her attitude toward him continued to be that of an old acquaintance. She took him as a matter of course; and though this was pleasant, it shut the door on the thousand and one questions he wished to ask her.

Just now she was urging him to try the sandwiches; she had made them herself, she averred, and he need not be afraid of them.

“Perhaps,” he suggested with an accession of courage, “you won’t mind telling me your name.”

“It was nice of you to come,” she remarked dreamily, ignoring his question, “without asking for credentials. I’ll be perfectly frank and tell you that I couldn’t give you references if you asked for them; you’re my first client! I almost said patient!” she added laughingly.

“If you had said patient you would have made no mistake! I’ve been out of sorts—my wits not working for months.”

“I thought your last book sounded a little tired,” she replied. “There were internal evidences of weariness. You rather worked the long arm of coincidence overtime, for example—none of your earlier bounce and zest. Even your last short story didn’t quite get over—a little too self-conscious probably; and the heroine must have identified the hero the first time she saw him in his canoe.”

She not only stated her criticisms frankly but she uttered them with assurance, as though she had every right to pass judgment on his performances. This was the least bit irritating. He was slightly annoyed—as annoyed as any man of decent manners dare be at the prettiest girl who has ever brightened his horizon. But this passed quickly.

Not only was she a pretty girl but he became conscious of little graces and gestures, and of a charming direct gaze, that fascinated him. And, for all her youth, she was very wise; he was confident of that.

“I must tell you that though I had dozens of letters, yours was the only one that appealed to me. A majority of them were frivolous, and some were from writers whose work I dislike. I had a feeling that if they were played out they never would be missed. But you were different; you are Farrington, and to have you fail would be a calamity to American literature.”

He murmured his thanks. Her sympathetic tone was grateful to his bruised spirit. He had gone too far now to laugh away his appeal to her. And as the moments passed his reliance on her grew.

They talked of the weather, the hills and the autumn foliage, while he speculated as to her identity.

“Of course you know the Berkshires well, Miss——”

“A man who can’t play a better approach than that certainly needs help!” she laughed.

He flushed and stammered.

“Of course I might have asked you directly if you lived in the Hills. But let us be reasonable. I’m at least entitled to your name; without that——”

“Without it you will be just as happy!”

“Oh, but you don’t mean that you won’t——”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” She smiled, her elbows on the table, the slim brown fingers interlaced under her firm rounded chin.

“That isn’t fair. You know me; and yet I’m utterly in the dark as to you——”

“Oh, names are not of the slightest importance. Of course X Y Z is rather awkward. Let’s find another name—something you can call me by as a matter of convenience if, indeed, we meet again.”

She bit into a macaroon dreamily while this took effect.

“Not meet again!” he exclaimed.

“Oh, of course it’s possible we may not. We haven’t discussed our business yet; but when we reach it you may not care for another interview.”

“On a strictly social basis I can’t imagine myself never seeing you again. As for my business, let it go hang!”

She lifted a finger with a mockery of warning.

“No business, no more tea; no more anything! You would hardly call the doctor or the lawyer merely to talk about the scenery. And by the same token you can hardly take the time of a person in my occupation without paying for it.”

“But, Miss——”

“There you go again! Well, if you must have a name, call me Arabella! And never mind about ‘Miss-ing’ me.”

“You’re the first Arabella I’ve ever known!” he exclaimed fervidly.

“Then be sure I’m the last!” she returned mockingly; then she laughed gayly. “Oh, rubbish! Let’s be sensible. I have a feeling that the girls in your stories are painfully stiff, and they’re a little too much alike. They’re always just coming down from Newport or Bar Harbor, and we are introduced to them as they enter their marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and ring for Walters to serve tea at once. You ought to cut out those stately, impossible queens and go in for human interest. I’ll be really brutal and say that I’m tired of having your heroine pale slightly as her lover—the one she sent to bring her an orchid known only to a cannibal tribe of the upper Amazon—appears suddenly at the door of her box at the Metropolitan, just as Wolfram strikes up his eulogy of love in Tannhauser. If one of the cannibals in his war dress should appear at the box door carrying the lover’s head in a wicker basket, that would be interesting; but for Mister Lover to come wearing the orchid in his button-hole is commonplace. Do you follow me?”

She saw that he flinched. No one had ever said such things to his face before.

“Oh, I know the critics praise you for your wonderful portrait gallery of women, but your girls don’t strike me as being real spontaneous American girls. Do you forgive me?”

He would have forgiven her if she had told him she had poisoned his tea and that he would be a dead man in five minutes.

“Perhaps,” he remarked boldly, “the fact that I never saw you until today will explain my failures!”

“A little obvious!” she commented serenely. “But we’ll overlook it this time. You may smoke if you like.”

She lighted a match for him and held it to the tip of his cigarette. This brought him closer to the brown eyes for an intoxicating instant. Brief as that moment was, he had detected on each side of her nose little patches of freckles that were wholly invisible across the table. He was ashamed to have seen them, but the knowledge of their presence made his heart go pitapat. His heart had always performed its physical functions with the utmost regularity, but as a center of emotions he did not know it at all. He must have a care. Arabella folded her hands on the edge of the table.

“The question before us now is whether you wish to advise with me as to plots. Before you answer you will have to determine whether you can trust me. It would be foolish for us to proceed if you don’t think I can help you. On the other hand, I can’t undertake a commission unless you intrust your case to me fully. And it wouldn’t be fair for you to allow me to proceed unless you mean to go through to the end. My system is my own; I can’t afford to divulge it unless you’re willing to confide in me.”

She turned her gaze upon the gold and scarlet foliage of the slope below, to leave him free to consider. He was surprised that he hesitated. As an excuse for tea-table frivolity this meeting was well enough; as a business proposition it was ridiculous. But this unaccountable Arabella appealed strongly to his imagination. If he allowed her to escape, if he told her he had answered the advertisement of X Y Z merely in jest, she was quite capable of telling him good-by and slipping away into the nowhere out of which she had come. No—he would not risk losing her; he would multiply opportunities for conferences that he might prolong the delight of seeing her.

“I have every confidence,” he said in a moment, “that you can help me. I can tell you in a word the whole of my trouble.”

“Very well, if you are quite sure of it,” she replied.

“The plain truth about me is,” he said earnestly—and the fear he had known for days showed now in his eyes——“the fact about me is that I’m a dead one! I’ve lost my stroke. To be concrete, I’ve broken down in the third chapter of a book I promised to deliver in January, and I can’t drag it a line further!”

“It’s as clear as daylight that you’re in a blue funk,” she remarked. “You’re scared to death. And that will never do! You’ve got to brace up and cheer up! And the first thing I would suggest is——”

“Yes, yes!” he whispered eagerly.

“Burn those three chapters and every note you’ve made for the book.”

“I’ve already burned them forty times!” he replied ruefully.

“Burn them again. Then in a week, say, if you follow my advice explicitly, it’s quite likely you’ll find a new story calling you.”

“Just waiting won’t do it! I’ve tried that.”

“But not under my care,” she reminded him with one of her enthralling smiles. “An eminent writer has declared that there are only nine basic plots known to fiction; the rest are all variations. Let it be our affair to find a new one—something that has never been tried before!”

“If you could do that you’d save my reputation. You’d pull me back from the yawning pit of failure!”

“Cease firing! You’ve been making hard work of what ought to be the grandest fun in the world. The Quill had a picture of you planted beside a beautiful mahogany desk, waiting to be inspired. There’s not much in this inspiration business. You’ve got to choose some real people, mix them up and let them go to it!”

“But,” Farrington frowned, “how are you ever going to get them together? You can’t pick out the interesting people you meet in the street and ask them to work up a plot for you.”

“No,” she asserted, “you don’t ask them; you just make them do it. You see”—taking up a cube of sugar and touching it to the tip of her tongue—“every living man and woman, old or young, is bitten with the idea that he or she is made for adventure.”

“Rocking-chair heroes,” he retorted, “who’d cry if they got their feet wet going home from church!”

“The tamer they are, the more they pine to hear the silver trumpet of romance under their windows,” she replied, her eyes dancing.

He was growing deeply interested. She was no ordinary person, this girl.

“I see one obstacle,” he replied dubiously. “Would you mind telling me just how you’re going to effect these combinations—assemble the parts, so to speak; or, in your more poetical manner, make the characters harken to the silver horn?”

“That,” she replied readily, “is the easiest part of all! You’ve already lost so much time that this is an emergency case and we’ll call them by telegraph!”

“You don’t mean that—not really!”

“Just that! We’ll have to decide what combination would be the most amusing. We should want to bring together the most utterly impossible people—people who’d just naturally hate each other if they were left in the same room. In that way you’d quicken the action.”

He laughed aloud at the possibilities; but she went on blithely:

“We ought to have a person of national distinction—a statesman preferred; some one who figures a lot in the newspapers. Let’s begin,” she suggested, “with the person in all the United States who has the least sense of humor.”

“The competition would be keen for that honor,” said Farrington, “but I suggest the Honorable Tracy B. Banning, the solemnest of all the United States senators—Idaho or Rhode Island—I forget where he hails from. It doesn’t matter.”

“I hoped you’d think of him,” she exclaimed, striking her hands together delightedly.

“He owns a house—huge, ugly thing—on the other side of Corydon.”

“Um! I think I’ve heard of it,” she replied indifferently.

She drew from her sweater pocket and spread on the table these articles: a tiny vanity box, a silver-backed memorandum book, two caramels and the stub of a lead-pencil. There was a monogram on the vanity box, and remembering this she returned it quickly to her pocket. He watched her write the Senator’s name in her book, in the same vertical hand in which the note making the appointment had been written. She lifted her head, narrowing her eyes with the stress of thought.

“If a man has a wife we ought to include her, perhaps.”

Farrington threw back his head and laughed.

“Seems to me his wife’s divorcing him—or the other way round. The press has been featuring them lately.”

“Representative of regrettable tendency in American life,” she murmured. “They go down as Mr. and Mrs.”

“Now it’s your turn,” he said.

“Suppose we put in a gay and cheerful character now to offset the Senator. I was reading the other day about the eccentric Miss Sallie Collingwood, of Portland, Maine; she’s rich enough to own a fleet of yachts, but she cruises up and down the coast in a disreputable old schooner—has a mariner’s license and smokes a pipe. Is she selected?”

“I can’t believe there’s anybody so worth while on earth!”

“That’s your trouble!” she exclaimed, as she wrote the name. “Your characters never use the wrong fork for the fish course; they’re all perfectly proper and stupid. Now it’s your turn.”

“It seems to me,” he suggested, “that you ought to name all the others. As I think of it, I really don’t know any interesting people. You’re right about the tameness of my characters, and my notebooks are absolutely blank.”

She merely nodded.

“Very well; I suppose it’s only fair for me to supply the rest of the eggs for the omelet. Let me see; there’s been a good deal in the papers about Birdie Coningsby, the son of the copper king, one of the richest young men in America. I’ve heard that he has red hair, and that will brighten the color scheme.”

“Excellent!” murmured Farrington. “He was arrested last week for running over a traffic cop in New Jersey. I judge that the adventurous life appeals to him.”

“I suppose our Senator represents the state; the church also should be represented. Why not a clergyman of some sort? A bishop rather appeals to me; why not that Bishop of Tuscarora who’s been warning New York against its sinful ways?”

“All right. He’s at least a man of courage; let’s give him a chance.”

“A detective always helps,” Arabella observed meditatively.

“Then by all means put in Gadsby! I’m tired of reading of his exploits. I think he’s the most conceited ass now before the public.”

“Gadsby is enrolled!”

She held up the memorandum for his inspection.

“That’s about enough to start things,” she remarked. “It’s a mistake to have too many characters in a novel. Of course others may be drawn in—we can count on that.”

“But the heroine—a girl that realizes America’s finest and best——”

“I think she should be the unknown quantity—left up in the air. But if you don’t agree with that——”

“I was thinking,” he said, meeting her eyes, “that possibly you——”

One of her most charming smiles rewarded this.

“As the chief plotter, I must stand on the sidelines and keep out of it. But if you think——”

“I think,” he declared, “that the plot would be a failure if you weren’t in it—very much in it.”

“Oh, we must pass that. But there might be a girl of some sort. What would you think of Zaliska?”

“The dancer! To offset the bishop!”

The mirth in her eyes kindled a quick response in his. She laughingly jotted down the name of the Servian dancer who had lately kicked her way into fame on Broadway.

“But do you think,” he interposed, “that the call of the silver horn is likely to appeal to her? She’d need a jazz band!”

“Oh, variety is the spice of adventure! We’ll give her a chance,” she answered. “I think we have done well. One name more needs to be inscribed—that of Laurance Farrington.”

She lifted her hand quickly as he demurred.

“You need experiences—adventures—to tone up your imagination. Perhaps Zaliska will be your fate; but there’s always the unknown quantity.”

They debated this at length. He insisted that he would be able to contribute nothing to the affair; that it was his lack of ideas which had caused him to appeal to her for help, and that it would be best for him to act the role of interested spectator.

“I’m sorry, but your objections don’t impress me, Mr. Farrington. If you’re not in the game you won’t be able to watch it in all its details. So down you go!”

For a moment she pondered, with a wrinkling of her pretty brows, the memorandum before her; then she closed the book and dropped it into her sweater pocket. He was immensely interested in her next step, wondering whether she really meant to bring together the widely scattered and unrelated people she had selected for parts in the drama that was to be enacted for his benefit.

She rose so quickly that he was startled, gave a boyish tug at her hat—there was something rather boyish about her in spite of her girlishness—and said with an air of determination:

“How would Thursday strike you for the first rehearsal? Very well, then. There may be some difficulty in reaching all of them by telegraph; but that’s my trouble. Just where to hold the meeting is a delicate question. We should have”—she bent her head for an instant—“an empty house with large grounds; somewhere in these hills there must be such a place. You know the country better than I. Maybe——”

“To give a house party without the owner’s knowledge or consent is going pretty far; there might be legal complications,” he suggested seriously.

“Timidity doesn’t go in the adventurous life. And besides,” she added calmly, “that matter doesn’t concern us in the least. If they all get arrested it’s so much the better for the plot. We can’t hope for anything as grand as that!”

“But how about you! What if you should be discovered and go to jail! Imagine my feelings!”

“Oh, you’re not to worry about me. That’s my professional risk.”

“Then, as to the place, what objection is there to choosing Senator Banning’s house? He’s in the cast anyhow. His place, I believe, hasn’t been occupied for a couple of years. The gates were nailed up the last time I passed there.”

She laughed at this suggestion rather more merrily than she had laughed before.

“That’s a capital idea! Particularly as we’ve chosen him for his lack of humor!”

“If he has any fun in him he’ll have a chance to show it,” said Farrington, “when he finds his house filled with people he never saw before.”

Questions of taste as to this procedure, hanging hazily at the back of his consciousness, were dispelled by Arabella’s mirthful attitude toward the plan. He could hardly tell this joyous young person that it would be transcending the bounds of girlish naughtiness to telegraph a lot of people she didn’t know to meet at the house of a gentleman who enjoyed national fame for his lack of humor. Arabella would only laugh at him. The delight that danced in her eyes was infectious and the spirit of adventure possessed him. He was impatient for the outcome: still, would she—dared she—do it?

She had drawn on a pair of tan gloves and struck her hands together lightly.

“This has been the nicest of little parties! I thank you—the first of my clients! But I must skip!”

He had been dreading the moment when she might take it into her head to skip. They had lingered long and the sun had dropped like a golden ball beyond the woodland.

“But you will let me help with the tea things?” he cried eagerly. “I can telephone from the crossroads for my machine.”

She ignored his offer. A dreamy look came into her eyes.

“I wonder,” she said with the air of a child proposing a new game, “whether anyone’s ever written a story about a person—man or girl—who undertakes to find some one; who seeks and seeks until it’s a puzzling and endless quest—and then finds that the quarry is himself—or herself! Do you care for that? Think it over. I throw that in merely as a sample. We can do a lot better than that.”

“Oh, you must put it in the bill!”

“Now,” she said, “please, when you leave, don’t look back; and don’t try to find me! In this business who seeks shall never find. We place everything on the knees of the gods. Thursday evening, at Mr. Banning’s, at eight o’clock. Please be prompt.”

Then she lifted her arms toward the sky and cried out happily:

“There, sir, is the silver trumpet of romance! I make you a present of it.”

He raised his eyes to the faint outline of the new moon that shone clearly through the tremulous dusk.

As he looked she placed her hands on the veranda railing and vaulted over it so lightly that he did not know she had gone until he heard her laughing as she sprang away and darted through the shrubbery below.

From the instant Arabella disappeared Farrington tortured himself with doubts. One hour he believed in her implicitly; the next he was confident that she had been playing with him and that he would never see her again.

He rose early Wednesday morning and set out in his runabout—a swift scouring machine—and covered a large part of Western Massachusetts before nightfall. Somewhere, he hoped, he might see her—this amazing Arabella, who had handed him the moon and run away! He visited the tea house; but every vestige of their conference had been removed. He was even unable to identify the particular table and chairs they had used. He drove to the Banning place, looked at the padlocked gates and the heavily shuttered windows, and hurried on, torn again by doubts. He cruised slowly through villages and past country clubs where girls adorned the landscape, hoping for a glimpse of her. It was the darkest day of his life, and when he crawled into bed at midnight he was seriously questioning his own sanity.

A storm fell on the hills in the night and the fateful day dawned cold and wet. He heard the rain on his windows gratefully. If the girl had merely been making sport of him he wanted the weather to do its worst. He cared nothing for his reputation now; the writing of novels was a puerile business, better left to women anyhow. The receipt of three letters from editors asking for serial rights to his next book enraged him. Idiots, not to know that he was out of the running forever!

He dined early, fortified himself against the persistent downpour by donning a corduroy suit and a heavy mackintosh, and set off for the Banning place at seven o’clock. Once on his way he was beset by a fear that he might arrive too early. As he was to be a spectator of the effects of the gathering, it would be well not to be first on the scene. As he passed through Corydon his engine changed its tune ominously and he stopped at a garage to have it tinkered. This required half an hour, but gave him an excuse for relieving his nervousness by finishing the run at high speed.

A big touring car crowded close to him, and in response to fierce honkings he made way for it. His headlights struck the muddy stern of the flying car and hope rose in him. This was possibly one of the adventurers hastening into the hills in response to Arabella’s summons. A moment later a racing car, running like an express train, shot by and his lamps played on the back of the driver huddled over his wheel.

When he neared the Banning grounds Farrington stopped his car, extinguished the lights and drove it in close to the fence.

It was nearly eight-thirty and the danger of being first had now passed. As he tramped along the muddy road he heard, somewhere ahead, another car, evidently seeking an entrance. Some earlier arrival had opened the gates, and as he passed in and followed the curving road he saw that the house was brilliantly lighted.

As he reached the steps that led up to the broad main entrance he became panic-stricken at the thought of entering a house the owner of which he did not know from Adam, on an errand that he felt himself incapable of explaining satisfactorily. He turned back and was moving toward the gates when the short, burly figure of a man loomed before him and heavy hands fell on his shoulders.

“I beg your pardon!” said Farrington breathlessly. An electric lamp flashed in his face, mud-splashed from his drive, and his captor demanded his business. “I was just passing,” he faltered, “and I thought perhaps——”

“Well, if you thought perhaps, you can just come up to the house and let us have a look at you,” said the stranger gruffly.

With a frantic effort Farrington wrenched himself free; but as he started to run he was caught by the collar of his raincoat and jerked back.

“None of that now! You climb right up to the house with me. You try bolting again and I’ll plug you.”

To risk a bullet in the back was not to be considered in any view of the matter, and Farrington set off with as much dignity as he could assume, his collar tightly gripped by his captor.

As they crossed the veranda the front door was thrown open and a man appeared at the threshold. Behind him hovered two other persons.

“Well, Gadsby, what have you found?”

“I think,” said Farrington’s captor with elation, “that we’ve got the man we’re looking for!”

Farrington was thrust roughly through the door and into a broad, brilliantly lighted hall.