know you had any ideas like that," she declared finally. "I should have thought you'd have more ambition.'

"I haven't," said Susan, turning to her work tranquilly.

Mrs. Royal stood plucking at her lips. After a time she walked slowly from the kitchen and through the dining-room. She looked toward Mann, but to her surprise and resentment he was seemingly too deeply absorbed to know of her presence.

Susan worked steadily and diligently that afternoon, so that she should be ready for whatever emergencies might arise. As the supper-hour drew near she sighed deeply, and she could not have said whether more of weariness or satisfaction was expressed in that sigh. She had done her work well, and she had taxed her strength to the utmost.

During an interval of waiting she emerged from the front door of the hotel and stood on the immense front porch. She had the fleeting sensation of standing aloof, on a high stage, looking down upon the petty world surrounding her. She seemed very far away from that picture of bucolic placidity down in the public square. Indeed, if the spirit of the man who had planned that stately structure could have passed that way he might easily have conceived the idea that one of the deities he had enshrined there the deity of peace and high ideals-had emerged from its place to stand a moment and look down upon the petty souls in the public square, waiting to adjust those human difficulties which never can be adjusted.

With her slim stateliness and her softly serious eyes, Susan was not an inappropriate figure to typify all that the old house had ever stood for.

But in a moment she was gone. She sighed again as she returned to her place in the kitchen. The hard work and the petty annoyances of the day had not been without their effect upon her. The disappointment which has in it traces of a helpful chastisement was upon her, and for a moment she had a vision of herself and Mann in some sylvan spot-alone with him, and unafraid of him. She saw herself sitting with him under the stars,

with her head on his shoulder and her heart at rest. But she shook her head and drove the dream away.

She was hard at work a few minutes later. The dining-room began to fill, and now Mrs. Royal's predictions were justified. Strangers were entering the place. Some took their places timidly, almost furtively, at the nearest tables. Others seemed disposed to place themselves on view, and stood leisurely before their chairs before sitting down, and surveyed their surroundings complacently.

Susan began her countless trips between kitchen and dining-room; and when Mrs. Royal, with an obvious weakness for tyranny, urged her to move more rapidly, she lost her poise a little. Her hands trembled and much of her effectiveness was gone.

Yet in half an hour she seemed to have surmounted her last obstacle and to be in sight of the end. She had become slightly dizzy, when she noted that a belated diner had just appeared and had taken a seat with his back toward her near the far entrance to the dining-room.

Again she came forth with her waiter on her arm. She placed herself before the newcomer and was about to adjust her waiter on the table, when she drew a sharp breath and stood stiffly in her place.

The diner had poured himself a glass of water and was about to drink. He leaned forward and pressed two long wings of whiskers to his breast; and then, before raising the glass to his lips, he lifted his eyes to Susan's.

Instantly her knees seemed to fail her and she grasped the edge of the table for support. The suddenness of the thing that had happened had unnerved her and the waiter with its contents crashed to the floor.

Every eye in the dining-room was turned upon her. She heard a few sounds of regret, and there was the sound of laughter too. Mrs. Royal emerged from the kitchen and came forward a little more alertly than Susan had ever seen her move before.

"Ah! Mrs. Herkimer!" said Judge Ligon, setting the glass of water back on the table.

And Mrs. Royal heard.

LLINGTON HOPE entered his cramped consulting-room early one morning dead broke, sick at heart, and ready to give up the fight for practice in a city already overrun by older and better established physicians. Consequently a long and exceedingly thick manila envelope left by the postman had interested him not at all. "More advertising blotters," was his grim thought as he tore off an end and dumped the contents of the envelope onto his desk. Then he received a shock. What slid from the envelope was a thick sheaf of paper money. He took up the bills wonderingly, felt them, counted them twice. There were in all a hundred bills, each a new yellow-back gold certificate for one thousand dollars. A hundred thousand dollars! When he had recovered in some measure from the first shock of coming into sudden possession of so much money, the bewildered young man went quickly to the door and locked it. Then he sat down at his desk and began a more critical examination of the money and the envelope in which it had come.

Naturally, a first thought was that the money might not be genuine-that it might be some sort of green-goods bait; but Illington Hope had been at one period of his life a bank clerk, and he speedily came to the conclusion that the certificates were perfectly good currency. Moreover, no one would be foolish enough to make spurious bills of such large denomination.

Thus satisfied that the money was genuine, he stacked it in a neat pile and turned his attention to the question of its source. The manila envelope was heavy and opaque but perfectly plain, and contained no explanatory letter, note, or card whatsoever. It had brought absolutely nothing but the money. The envelope

itself was type-addressed to "Doctor Illington Hope, 942 Frazer Building," and was postmarked Washington, D. C., where it had been mailed the day before.

Having carefully considered these meagre details, Hope locked the envelope in a drawer of his desk, put the sheaf of bills carefully in an inside pocket, and lit a cigarette. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair, put his feet well up on the top of his desk, and loosed his imagination.

By no flight of fancy, however, could he conceive of why the money had been sent to him, or whence it had come. Scarcely a year had elapsed since he had left the hospital to begin practice, and he could almost number the private patients he had treated on the fingers of one hand. Of these, few had been grateful and none rich. Nor had he any affluent relations.

Could the money have been sent to him by some huge mistake, he wondered. Or was there behind it some sinister design? He could not imagine.

Accordingly, he gave up trying to figure out the source of this gift of fortune, if gift it was, and from these fruitless deliberations turned his thoughts to the more fascinating question of what to do with the money. The notion of advertising for claimants to a fabulous sum of money, received unsolicited through the mail, was not long entertained. The converse idea of using the money for present pressing needs was considered somewhat more fully, but this, too, was at length given a lingering au revoir and shunted onto a psychic siding just in time to make way for a swift new train of thought which jarred the dreamer into action.

Illington Hope, M.D., struck his rickety little desk a jubilant thump, threw away his already extinguished cigarette, and hurried from the room.

A dozen or more other doctors in vary

ing degrees of destitution and prosperity occupied offices on the same floor with Hope. And into the sanctum of the nearest of these he projected himself forthwith.

"Clem," he said, after an exchange of informal salutations, "where do you do your banking?"

Doctor Jean Clement closed a large medical volume and leaned back meditatively in his desk chair.

"I haven't done any in some little time," he replied, with a yawn. "Where do you do yours?"

"I'm supposed to do it at the Third," Hope answered, "but I want to make a change. Give me a note of introduction to your bank, old fellow."

"Sure," said Doctor Clement, reaching for pen and paper, "but heaven help the line of credit they'll hand you on my recommendation! What's the trouble? Won't the Third pay your overdrafts?" "Not only that," Hope replied, pocketing the letter of introduction, "but other things besides. Excuse me if I run along, Clem, I've got to hurry out and attend to my practice.

"Isn't he dead yet?" Doctor Clement called after the retreating figure of his friend, but Hope hurried down the hallway, smilingly conscious of the fact that the time was now near when his practice would probably consist of more than one patient.

By noon Hope had visited a number of friends and acquired letters of introduction to nine national banks in the city. Then he presented himself at the receiving teller's window in the Third National Bank. Here he already had a precarious account. Into the window he slid his pass-book, a deposit-slip and ten onethousand-dollar bills. The teller at first preserved a professional expression of indifference as he raked in the bills and counted them over. But when he looked out and saw Doctor Hope, who had never before deposited more than fifty dollars at a time, he registered surprise.

"Come into an inheritance, doctor?" he inquired politely enough.

"Well, no," Doctor Hope replied. "I've just sold my orange-grove in Florida. I am glad to get rid of it, too. You have to watch after such places in

person if you ever get any income from them."

"I guess you're right," said the teller, and reached for the next man's deposit. Hope now sought out Mr. Bruce, the well-groomed if cold-blooded cashier of the Third. As the doctor approached the ornate marble breastworks behind which Mr. Bruce was habitually intrenched, the cashier's countenance took on a sort of added grimness, and he failed utterly to acknowledge the polite greeting of the customer. Mr. Bruce thought Doctor Hope was about to strike for an additional accommodation.

"Mr. Bruce," said the doctor modestly, "I have just succeeded in disposing of some lands in Florida and am at last in shape to make my account worth something to the bank. While heretofore I haven't been in position to keep much of a balance here, I trust I have impressed you with my good character, at least.”

Mr. Bruce condescended to nod a brief though non-committal acknowledgment of this speech.

"I have just made a deposit," Doctor Hope continued, "of ten thousand dollars, and—”

"Mr. Evins," said the cashier, interrupting the physician in an almost cheerful tone of voice, "open the gate there and get a chair for Doctor Hope. Come in, doctor, and have a seat!"

Illington Hope did come in, and when he went out he had established an enviable line of credit at the Third National Bank, on the strength of his ten thousand balance. He gave as his reason for asking liberal credit his intention of making certain investments from time to time.

From the Third National Bank he went to another bank, opened an account there, and laid the foundation for loans later on. Similarly he then opened accounts and prepared for credit at eight other banks, so that by two o'clock he had ten thousand dollars on deposit in each of ten banks. ·

Thus, when the young man repaired to a late luncheon he had a major-league credit to draw upon without disturbing his mysterious capital, which he had resolved to hold in trust indefinitely. He had found the way to a credit of two, three, or even five hundred thousand dol

lars so soon as his sundry large balances should have stayed sufficiently long in their respective banks.

Accordingly, Hope ate a very good luncheon indeed and thought of many things, not least among which was that perfect little queen, Alexa Bain.

II

THE one dream of Illington Hope's professional life had been the conquest of a malignant malady; and few men had studied the problem of this dread disease so thoroughly, so profoundly as he. Doubtless the fact that his own mother had succumbed to its ravages was the mainspring of his perpetual effort to conquer carcinoma. He it was who had thought first of radium as a weapon against certain forms of the disorder, and more than once he had confided to friends a burning wish to possess himself of enough of this fabulously costly element with which to test out and prove his conclusions.

In the months since Dame Fortune had brought him a cryptic capital of a hundred thousand dollars, he had moved into, more commodious quarters, acquired an adequate supply of radium and opened a free clinic for the handling of malignant cases. Not radium alone, but surgical means and sera as well contributed to his armamentarium. His success in many favorable cases had been signal. ·

Thus it was that on a certain morning he sat at the handsome mahogany desk in his new consulting-room and beamed. approvingly at a smartly dressed young woman, the lambent depths of whose brown eyes seemed to him almost liquid in their intensity. But there were in Alexa Bain points of distinction other than her chic person and charming orbs. She had the divine gift of comradeship; also poise. And pervading her engaging personality there was an ever-present power of sympathy. Daughter of an inordinately rich metropolitan banker, she preserved an unselfish charm all too rare in her world and ours. Hope had worked with her during his hospital days among the poor and needy in New York, and between the earnest intern and gracious

deepened insensibly into something more than friendship by the time he had left New York to hang his shingle in another town.

Because of the disparity in their respective fortunes, however, Hope had gradually ceased to write and had almost resigned himself to the mandate of a cruel fate, when the big thing happened. Then he had remembered the one shadow over Alexa's happiness-the malignant illness of her mother.

As the young savant's list of successes with charity patients grew, his fame insensibly began to spread. Came then a letter one day from Alexa Bain. "Will you receive my mother, Mrs. Hamilton Bain, as a patient?" it inquired. From Hope's prompt reply it was clear that the banker's wife would be received as a patient forthwith, and as a result she had come with her daughter Alexa, who now sat with the doctor for a space while the patient rested in another room.

"So you think," said the girl, “that there is really a chance for mother?"

"Best sort, my friend," Hope replied. "But how did you ever prevail upon your father to let you bring her to me?"

Alexa favored him with an admiring little smile. "He had already heard of your work through others when I called his attention to the published reports of your achievements in the medical papers."

"You still read medical journals, then?"

The girl reddened ever so slightly. "Yes; for mother's sake," she said. Then as if to turn the topic: "Do you realize, Illington, that you are becoming famous?"

Hope thrilled at the sound of his Christian name on her lips.

"No," he said, "but I am making money at last-how much I am ashamed almost to think."

"No more than you deserve, poor fellow," said Alexa, rising. "Now show me through the laboratories, the operatingrooms, everything-I am so interested in your wonderful work. When one stops to consider that out of every seven women who die above the age of thirty, malignant disease claims one and that the percentage

the terror of this scourge is truly appalling!"

Hope held open the door leading to his well-equipped laboratory. "Well," he remarked, as they passed out, "I dismissed one of the seven sound and well to-day. A Mrs. Stephen from New York, she is; and a wonderful little woman, too. Somehow her recovery has been one of peculiar satisfaction to me. There is some hidden sorrow in her life, I believe."

With the passage of interviews incident, day by day, to the treatment of the mother, the charming daughter and zeal ous young physician grew closer to one another, as is the way of youth. Also the patient grew rapidly well and in so doing. added yet another victory to the achievements of Doctor Illington Hope.

At about this time, however, the young man began to be worried ever and anon concerning the unearned thousands reposing in sundry banks to his exclusive credit. The proximity of Alexa with her unsullied ideals and lofty principles had much to do, no doubt, with this feeling of unrest. What would Alexa think of him if she should know that he held funds of so doubtful an origin? Would not her fine nature revolt at the fact that he had made no effort to locate the source, the owner of all this money? Sensible girl that she was, he trembled to contemplate what her attitude might be. Moreover, the time had come when he no longer needed this money, nor even the credit which it gave him.

Thus it was that Illington Hope began almost to hate the money that had enabled him to realize so brilliantly one of the dreams of his life. Naturally enough, then, he made up his mind to ferret out the secret sender of the hundred gold certificates.

It was after a hard day's work that he came to this decision, sitting alone in the reading-room of his club. The approach at the moment of his friend, Lee Lanier, cashier of the Bellgrade Bank, prompted him to begin his quest at once.

"Look here, Lanier," said Hope, "is there an efficient and thoroughly reliable detective in this town? Is there anybody of this sort that one may depend upon?"

Lanier inspected his elegantly manicured nails smilingly for a moment.

"You bet there is," he said at length. "Hugo Brill is the ablest and most dependable investigator in the world to-day. I ought to know. He saved my life once, not to mention two million dollars for the Bellgrade Bank."

"The devil, he did!" Hope exclaimed. "Yes," Lanier affirmed, "but don't call him a detective. He resents that. He says he is not a detective but merely a consulting criminologist. He's the man who sent Owen Marlboro to the chair. But don't say sleuth where he can hear it."

III

ON the morning following Doctor Hope's conversation with Lanier at the club, Hamilton Bain, Esq., sat in his sumptuous presidential office at the Bain National Bank, New York, and read his daily letter of good tidings from Alexa and her mother. It appeared that Mrs. Bain was now restored to health and that Alexa wanted him to come in person to thank the doctor and settle the bill. "Well," thought the great man, "perhaps I shall, perhaps I ought."

Here his train of thought was brought to an abrupt standstill, however, by the sudden entrance of C. Sebastian, his cashier. Sebastian's usually insolent countenance was white as paper and his hand shook as he closed the door behind him.

"What's wrong?" Bain demanded. "The bank examiner has discovered a shortage

"Where?"

"In the reserve vault!"

Bain rose abruptly. "In the reserve vault, you say?"

"That's it," said the cashier briefly. "How much-how much?" "One hundred thousand," said Sebastian.

Hamilton Bain sat down again, mopped his brow with a large handkerchief, and pursed his lips. "From whose safe was the money taken?" he asked, at length. "From Cleve's."

"What! Cleve! . . . Well I'll be damned," said Bain; "where is he?" "In my office with the examiner and bank detective," the cashier replied. "Bring them in," ordered Bain.