a favourite of every one; and next morning, when he found that
Montague sat a horse like one who was born to it, he invited him to
come out to his place on Long Island, and see some of the
fox-hunting.

Then, after he had dressed for dinner, Montague came downstairs, and
found Betty Wyman, shining like Aurora in an orange-coloured cloud.
Sho introduced him to Mrs. Vivie Patton, who was tall and slender
and fascinating, and had told her husband to go to hell. Mrs. Vivie
had black eyes that snapped and sparkled, and she was a geyser of
animation in a perpetual condition of eruption. Montague wondered if
she would have talked with him so gaily had she known what he knew
about her domestic entanglements.

The company moved into the dining-room, where there was served
another of those elaborate and enormously expensive meals which he
concluded he was fated to eat for the rest of his life. Only,
instead of Mrs. Billy Alden with her Scotch, there was Mrs. Vivie,
who drank champagne in terrifying quantities; and afterward there
was the inevitable grouping of the bridge fiends.

Among the guests there was a long-haired and wild-looking foreign
personage, who was the "lion" of the evening, and sat with half a
dozen admiring women about him. Now he was escorted to the
music-room, and revealed the fact that he was a violin virtuoso. He
played what was called "salon music"--music written especially for
ladies and gentlemen to listen to after dinner; and also a strange
contrivance called a concerto, put together to enable the player to
exhibit within a brief space the utmost possible variety of finger
gymnastics. To learn to perform these feats one had to devote his