I.

"I wish you a happy New Year, sir."

It was the servant, green of livery, the yellow waistcoat slashed with

black, bearing the coffee and fruit.

"Put it there, please," Roland answered. And then, in recognition of the

salutation, he added, "Thanks: the same to you."

"H'm," he mused, as the man withdrew, "I ought to have tipped him, I

suppose."

He leaned from the bed, poured some milk into a cup, and for a second

nibbled at a slice of iced orange. Through the transom came a faint odor

of home-made bread, and with it the rustle of a gown and a girl's clear

laugh. The room itself was small. It was furnished in a fashion which

was unsuggestive of an hotel, and yet did not resemble that of a

private house. The curtain had been already drawn. Beyond was a lake,

very blue in the sunlight, bulwarked by undulant hills. Below, on the

road, a dogcart fronted by a groom was awaiting somebody's pleasure.

"It is late," he reflected, and raised a napkin to his lips. As he did

so he noticed a package of letters which the napkin must have concealed.

He took up the topmost and eyed it. It had been addressed to the

Athenaeum Club, Fifth Avenue; but the original direction was erased, and

Tuxedo Park inserted in its stead. On the upper left-hand corner the

impress of a firm of tailors shone in blue. Opposite was the engraving

of a young woman supported by 2-1/2_d._ He put it down again and glanced

at the others. The superscriptions were characterless enough; each bore

a foreign stamp, and to one as practised as was he, each bore the token

of the dun.

"If they keep on bothering me like this," he muttered, "I shall

certainly place the matter in the hands of my attorney." And thereat,

with the air of a man who had said something insultingly original, he

laughed aloud, swallowed some coffee, and dashed his head in the pillow.

In and out of the corners of his mouth a smile still played; but

presently his fancy must have veered, for the muscles of his lips

compressed, and as he lay there, the arms clasped behind the head, the

pink silk of his sleeves framing and tinting his face, and in the eyes

the expression of one prepared to meet Fate and outwit it, a possible

observer who could have chanced that way would have sat himself down to

study and risen up perplexed.

Anyone who was at Columbia ten years ago will remember Roland

Mistrial,--Roland Mistrial 3d, if you please,--and will recall the wave

of bewilderment which swept the campus when that young gentleman, on the

eve of graduation, popularity on one side and honors on the other,

suddenly, without so much as a p. p. c., left everything where it was

and betook himself to other shores. The flight was indeed erratic, and

numerous were the rumors which it excited; but Commencement was at hand,

other issues were to be considered, bewilderment subsided as

bewilderment ever does, the college dispersed, and when it assembled

again the Mistrial mystery, though unelucidated, was practically forgot.

In the neighborhood of Washington Square, however, on the northwest

corner of Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue to be exact, there were others

whose memories were more retentive. Among them was Roland's grandfather,

himself a graduate, founder of the Mistrial fellowship, and judge of the

appellate court. And there was Roland's father, a graduate too, a

gentleman widely respected, all the more so perhaps because he had run

for the governorship and lost it. And again there was Roland's aunt, a

maiden lady of whom it is recorded that each day of her life she got

down on her knees and thanked God he had made her a Mistrial. In

addition to these, there were, scattered along the Hudson, certain

maternal relatives--the Algaroths, the Baxters, and the Swifts; Bishop

Algaroth in particular, who possessed such indomitable vigor that when

at the good old age of threescore and ten he decided to depart this

life, the impression prevailed that he had died very young for him. None

of these people readily forgot. They were a proud family and an

influential one--influential not merely in the social sense, but

influential in political, legal, in church and university circles as

well; a fact which may have had weight with the Faculty when it was

called upon to deal with Roland Mistrial 3d. But be that as it may, the

cause of the young man's disappearance was never officially given. Among

the rumors which it created was one to the effect that his health was

affected; in another his mind was implicated; and in a third it was his

heart. Yet as not one of these rumors had enough evidential value behind

it to concoct an anonymous letter on, they were suffered to go their way

undetained, very much as Roland had already gone his own.

That way led him straight to the Golden Gate and out of it to Japan.

Before he reached Yeddo his grandfather left the planet and a round sum

of money behind. Of that round sum the grandson came in for a portion.

It was not fabulous in dimensions, but in the East money goes far. In

this case it might have gone on indefinitely had not the beneficiary

seen fit to abandon the languors of the Orient for the breezier

atmosphere of the west. The Riviera has charms of its own. So, too, have

Paris and Vienna. Roland enjoyed them to the best of his ability. He

even found London attractive, and became acclimated in Pall Mall. In the

latter region he learned one day that his share of the round sum had

departed and his father as well. The conjunction of these incidents was

of such a character that he at once took ship for New York.

It was not that he was impatient to revisit the misgoverned city which

he had deserted ten years before. He had left it willingly enough, and

he had seldom regretted it since. The pins and needles on which he sat

were those of another make. He was uninformed of the disposition of his

father's property, and he felt that, were not every penny of it

bequeathed to him, he would be in a tight box indeed.

He was at that time just entering his thirtieth year--that age in which

a man who has led a certain life begins to be particular about the

quality of his red pepper, and anxious too that the supply of it shall

not tarry. Though meagre of late, the supply had been sufficient. But at

present the palate was a trifle impaired. Where a ten-pound note had

sufficed for its excitement, a hundred now were none too strong. Roland

Mistrial--3d no longer--wanted money, and he wanted plenty of it. He

had exact ideas as to its usefulness, and none at all regarding its

manufacture. He held, as many have done and will continue to do, that

the royal road to it leads through a testament; and it was in view of

the opening vistas which that road displayed that he set sail for New

York.

And now, six weeks later, on this fair noonday of a newer year, as he

lay outstretched in bed, you would have likened him to one well

qualified to keep a mother awake and bring her daughter dreams. Our

canons of beauty may be relative, but, such as they are, his features

accorded with them--disquietingly even; for they conveyed the irritating

charm of things we have hoped for, striven for, failed to get, and then

renounced with thanksgiving. They made you anxious about their

possessor, and fearful too lest the one dearly-beloved might chance to

see them, and so be subjugated by their spell. They were features that

represented good stock, good breeding, good taste, good looks--every

form of goodness, in fact, save, it may be, the proper one. But the

possible lack of that particular characteristic was a matter over which

hesitation well might be. We have all of us a trick of flattering

ourselves with the fancy that, however obtuse our neighbor is, we at

least are gifted with the insight of a detective--a faculty so rare and

enviable that the blunders we make must be committed with a view to its

concealment; yet, despite presumable shrewdness, now and then a face

will appear that eludes cataloguing, and leaves the observer perplexed.

Roland Mistrial's was one of these.

And now, as the pink silk of his shirt-sleeves tinted it, the expression

altered, and behind his contracted brows hurried processions of shifting

scenes. There was that initial catastrophe which awaited him almost on

the wharf--the discovery that his father had left him nothing, and that

for no other reason in the world than because he had nothing whatever

to leave--nothing, in fact, save the hereditary decoration of and right

of enrolment in the Society of the Cincinnati, the which, handed down

since Washingtonian days from one Mistrial to another, he held, as his

forefathers had before him, in trust for the Mistrials to be.

No, he could not have disposed of that, even had he so desired; but

everything else, the house on Tenth Street,--built originally for a

country-seat, in times when the Astor House was considered rather far

uptown,--bonds, scrip, and stocks, disappeared as utterly as had they

never been; for Roland's father, stricken with that form of dementia

which, to the complete discouragement of virtue, battens on men that

have led the chastest lives, had, at that age in which the typical rake

is forced to haul his standard down, surrendered himself to senile

debauchery, and in the lap of a female of uncertain attractions--of

whose mere existence no one had been previously aware--placed

title-deeds and certificates of stock. In a case such as this the

appeal of the rightful heir is listened to with such patience that judge

and jury too have been known to pass away and leave the tale unended.

And Roland, when the earliest dismay had in a measure subsided, saw

himself closeted with lawyers who offered modicums of hope in return for

proportionate fees. Then came a run up the Hudson, the welcomeless

greeting which waited him there, and the enervating imbecility of his

great aunt, whose fingers, mummified by gout, were tenacious enough on

the strings of her purse. That episode flitted by, leaving on memory's

camera only the degrading tableau of coin burrowed for and unobtained.

And through it all filtered torturesome uncertainties, the knowledge of

his entire inability to make money, the sense of strength misspent, the

perplexities that declined to take themselves away, forebodings of the

morrow, nay of the day even as well, the unbanishable dread of want.

But that for the moment had gone. He turned on his elbow and glanced

over at a card-case which lay among the silver-backed brushes beyond,

and at once the shock he had resummoned fled. Ah, yes! it had gone

indeed, but at the moment it had been appalling enough. The morrow at

least was secure; and as he pondered over its possibilities they faded

before certain episodes of the previous day--that chance encounter with

Alphabet Jones, who had insisted he should pack a valise and go down

with Trement Yarde and himself to Tuxedo; and at once the incidents

succeeding the arrival paraded through his thoughts. There had been the

late dinner to begin with; then the dance; the girl to whom some one had

presented him, and with whom he had sat it out; the escape of the year,

the health that was drunk to the new one, and afterwards the green baize

in the card-room; the bank which Trement Yarde had held, and finally the

successful operation that followed, and which consisted in cutting that

cherub's throat to the tune of three thousand dollars. It was all there

now in the card-case; and though, as sums of money go, it was hardly

quotable, yet in the abstract, forethought and economy aiding, it

represented several months of horizons solid and real. The day was

secure; as for the future, who knew what it might contain? A grave

perhaps, and in it his aunt.