floor. At their foot the young army surgeon was shaking hands with
Susan Josselyn. These two had had the chess-practice together--and
other practice--down there among the Southern hospitals.

Mrs. Thoresby's face was very like some fabric subjected to chemical
experiment, from which one color and aspect has been suddenly and
utterly discharged to make room for something different and new.
Between the first and last there waits a blank. With this blank full
upon her, she stood there for one brief, unprecedented instant in her
life, a figure without presence or effect. I have seen a daguerreotype
in which were cap, hair, and collar, quite correct,--what should have
been a face rubbed out. Mrs. Thoresby rubbed herself out, and so
performed her involuntary tableau.

"Of course I might have guessed. I wonder it never occurred to me,"
Mrs. Linceford was replying, presently, to her vacuous inquiry. "The
name seemed familiar, too; only he called himself 'Dakie.' I remember
perfectly now. Old Jacob Thayne, the Chicago millionaire. He married
pretty little Mrs. Ingleside, the Illinois Representative's widow,
that first winter I was in Washington. Why, Dakie must be a dollar
prince!"

He was just Dakie Thayne, though, for all that. He and Leslie and
Cousin Delight,--the Josselyns and the Inglesides,--dear Miss
Craydocke, hurrying up to congratulate,--Marmaduke Wharne looking on
without a shade of cynicism in the gladness of his face, and Sin Saxon
and Frank Scherman flitting up in the pauses of dance and promenade,--well,
after all, these were the central group that night. The pivot of the
little solar system was changed; but the chief planets made but slight
account of that; they just felt that it had grown very warm and