Morton Blaine returned to New York from his brief vacation to find
awaiting him a frantic note from John Schuyler, the man nearer to him
than any save himself, imploring him to "come at once." The appeal was
supplemented with the usual intimation that the service was to be
rendered to God rather than to man.

The note was twenty-four hours old. Blaine, without changing his
travelling clothes, rang for a cab and was driven rapidly up the Avenue.
He was a man of science, not of enthusiasms, cold, unerring, brilliant;
a superb intellectual machine, which never showed a fleck of rust,
unremittingly polished, and enlarged with every improvement. But for one
man he cherished an abiding sympathy; to that man he hastened on the
slightest summons, as he hastened now. They had been intimate in
boyhood; then in later years through mutual respect for each other's
high abilities and ambitions.

As the cab rolled over the asphalt of the Avenue, Blaine glanced idly at
the stream of carriages returning from the Park, lifting his hat to many
of the languid pretty women. He owed his minor fame to his guardianship
of fashionable nerves. He could calm hysteria with a pressure of his
cool flexible hand or a sudden modulation of his harsh voice. And women
dreaded his wrath. There were those who averred that his eyes could
smoke.

He leaned forward and raised his hat with sudden interest. She who
returned his bow was as cold in her coloring as a winter night, but
possessed a strength of line and depth of eye which suggested to the
analyst her power to give the world a shock did Circumstance cease to