SAFE!

The season wore on to its perihelion--a period, the scientific books
advise us, of the highest clang and crash of speed and whirl, of the
greatest brilliancy and deepest glow of a planet's existence. The
business of life, the pursuit of pleasure, and the scientific demolition
of our common enemy, Time, received all the care which such matters
require.

Débutantes bloomed and were duly culled by aged connoisseurs of such
wares, or by youthful aspirants with the means to pay the piper in the
form of a handsome settlement. The usual number of young persons of the
gentler sex entered the lists of life, with the mistaken notion that it
is love that makes the world go round, to ride away from the joust wiser
and sadder women.

There was the same round of conventional pleasures which the reader and
his humble servant have mixed in deeply or dilettante, according to his
taste or capacity for such giddy work. There was withal the usual
heart-burning, heart-bartering, heart--anything you will but breaking.
For we have not breaking hearts among us to-day. Providence, it would
seem, has run short of the commodity, and deals out only a few among a
number of persons.

Amid the whirl of rout, and ball, and picnic, race-meeting, polo-match,
and what-not, Paul Howard Alexis stalked misunderstood, distrusted; an
object of ridicule to some, of pity to others, of impatience to all. A
man, if it please you, with a purpose--a purpose at the latter end of