strike you as absurd, but I have only seen you in a dream—a long dream!” She smiled over this and with sudden decision took the card, dropping it into her shopping bag.

“You are not to follow. You promised!”

“Cross my heart! I shall remain here fifteen minutes. Can you vanish back into your sunbeam in fifteen minutes?”

“Completely.” Her little laugh was the finest thing he had ever heard. She smiled up into his face and passed out.

Fifteen minutes later, having, with the aid of a little lady of blonde accomplishments, selected a dozen pairs of crimson and green socks and paid for them, he looked at his watch.

“My dear,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind. There’s really no room in my grip for this bundle. Christmas is at hand—kindly hand them to Mother, with my best wishes.”

“And I have no mother, and I never saw him before!” she said to the floorwalker, hysterically. “And red and green socks!”

“Easy mash,” he laughed, “he’ll be back. Exchange for something else.” She opened a tiny vanity box and powdered her nose. It was ammunition wasted.

Fate is a merry jade, at times. Half way to Jacksonville in a Pullman next day a young woman with gentian eyes, who had time and again searched her handbag, opened a package of cheap lace to finish dressing a Christmas doll, and a card dropped out. It bore the inscription, “King Dubignon.” Underneath was penciled the information that he was associated with Beeker, Toomer & Church, Architects, New York, and to this was added, “Hotel Dempsey, Macon, three days.” Fate’s little jest was the concealment of the card in a fold of the paper wrapper for twenty-four hours.

 Chapter II

Chapter II

WHEN King Dubignon left Cornell and some seven hundred who had labored with him through several years of architecture and watercolor, he bore with him the consciousness that final examples of his work, left there, had not been excelled, and the memory of many friendly assurances that his place was waiting for him out in the great world. That he construed these assurances too literally was the fault of his temperament, and so, perfectly natural. Home yearning pulled him back to his beloved South for the initial plunge, and it was not long before his name in gilt invited the confidence of the good people of Macon, who had castles in the air.

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