"Good--excellent. What's the time?"

"Gone past seven-thirty, sir."

"By Jove! I shall be late. I am always late, my dear chap; it partly accounts for my extraordinary popularity. A hostess is so relieved to see me by the time I turn up that for years afterwards she a.s.sociates my face with pleasant sensations. Any mail, Sylvester?"

His servant crossed to the table, on which there reposed four letters.

"These came in this afternoon, sir."

"Read them to me while I dress."

"Read them, Mr. Montague?" The valet's face was a study of respectful expostulation.

"Is the idea so preposterous, my dear fellow? I believe most people write letters with the idea of having them read."

The decorous Sylvester sighed, and broke the seal of the first letter.

"I would beg to remind you," he read, "that your account----"

Montague made a deprecatory gesture. "How polite these trades-people are!" he said. "I shall expect one some day to enclose forget-me-nots.

The next letter?"

Sylvester solemnly opened a diminutive envelope. "Mrs. W. De-Ponsy Harris requests the pleasure----"

"Another request! What is it--a tea or a dance?"

"A dinner, sir."

"Good! I shall go. Mrs. Harris is the worst hostess in the city, but she keeps the best cook. Proceed."

The worthy Sylvester took from the table a delicately scented letter that breathed its delightful suggestion of romance to his grateful nostrils, whereupon he promptly blushed a deep, unlovely, tomato-like red. "It starts," said he, "'My Dearest Love----'"

His master glanced at him. "Don't blush," he said. "The _grande pa.s.sion_ is nothing to be ashamed of." He carefully adjusted his tie.

"What is the young lady's name?"

"Myrtle, sir."

"Ah, yes; poor little Myrtle! What a pity a woman clings to a romance that is dead. There is something morbid in women that makes them do it.

It is like embracing a corpse."

"Shall I read it, sir?"

"No, no; don't bother. I know what is in it. On the third page she declares she hates me, and on the fifth she denies it. Myrtle runs so deucedly to form."

A look of relief crossed the rotund countenance of Mr. Sylvester as he took up the last letter. "It's from a society for educating the poor, sir."

"Tear it up. What we need is a society for educating the rich."

Completely dressed, Montague turned round and struck an att.i.tude. "It is my intention some day," he said with mock airiness, "to found a _Conservatoire Universelle_, where philanthropists will be taught charity, ministers of the gospel gain humility, musicians learn to feel, and newspaper writers take up the elements of language. Heavens!

such scope as I should have! Stick your head out of the window and see if a taxi is waiting."

Sylvester raised the window and surveyed the street below. "It's there, sir," he said, drawing his head in.

"Then I shall leave you. Mrs. Le Roy is giving a dinner-party this evening, and she invariably has guests who listen charmingly.

Good-night, Sylvester."

"Good-night, sir."

When he was gone, William Sylvester scratched his thinly covered head.

He then shrugged his shoulders, and followed this action by pouring out a gla.s.s of sherry. He took a sip. "'Eavens!" he said aloud; "'ow 'e do talk!"

II

Montague leaned back in the taxicab and, enjoying that sense of contentment almost invariably engendered by a smooth-running vehicle, allowed his mind to browse in the meadows of memory.

It was a process which gave him considerable pleasure, for he was a man who respected his own accomplishments--though given to satirical comment on those of others. Satisfaction with his past had bred in him a contentment with the present.... And he never doubted the future; for was not to-morrow merely to-day carried on?

There were many reasons tending towards his peace of mind. One: that he was twenty-eight years of age. At such a period in a man's life he meets older men on a footing of equality, and younger men with patronage. Women of all ages admire him, and their husbands ask him to lunch at their clubs. There is no age more gratifying to the vanity.

The man of twenty-eight is an Amba.s.sador of Youth meeting the Plenipotentiaries of Age as an equal.

Unfortunately for Dennis Montague, he allowed his own excellent opinion of himself to deepen with the admiration of others until it completely outstripped all rivals. At twenty-six he had his first great love affair--with himself. At twenty-eight it had ripened into a sort of reverence. Occasionally he flirted with women, but such incidents were mere inconstancies, peccadillos, which never seriously threatened his own overwhelming _affaire d'amour_.

Born in Ottawa, Dennis was the son of an ambitious mother and a high-placed Government official. Educated for the law, he had applied a dexterous intellect to that n.o.ble and musty study, and had succeeded in having himself called to the Bar when he was twenty-three. Up to that time he had known no other civilization than that found in the capital of his native land, where a peer of the realm, graciously appointed by the Imperial Government to act as interpreter between the Mother Country and the Dominion of Canada, regularly spends his appointed term at the Government House, thereby stimulating Ottawa's social activities to fever-heat. It even produces a philosophy of its own among the capital's tuft-hunters. For, even if _this_ governor-general doesn't ask us to dinner, there's always a chance that the _next_ one will.

Montague became a noted figure in Ottawa's younger social set, and, though he expressed contempt for all such things, found a certain gratification in seeing his name appear constantly in the social columns of the city's press. It was a soothing sensation to read the chronicle of his adolescent activities.... Few people can resist a glow of pleasure on seeing in the morning paper that they were where they were the previous evening.

Even in the remotest rural districts of America the weekly journal records that "Hank Wilson went over to Hiram Johnston's farm at Hen's Creek to see his new barn. Hiram Johnston is one of the most enterprising farmers that we got."

But--there is something solid about that barn.

After the legal profession had opened its portals to Montague he moved to Toronto, accepting a junior partnership in a firm of some standing.

To his amazement, he found that in Toronto the _entree_ into the best circles--and he could not exist in any other--was more difficult than in Ottawa. Though both cities had that reverence for wealth which is universal, Toronto's large population made a sudden and successful _debut_ far from easy. There were so many sets--those who yachted, danced, and golfed; those who danced and golfed; and those who merely golfed. Montague decided that the last cla.s.s was too fatiguing.

Then there were those extraordinary people who practiced the arts in an amiable way. There is probably no city in the world where there exists more comfortable talent than in Toronto. For a time music was the occupation of musicians, but society embraced it, to the benefit of them both, with the result that musical homes abound.

This worried Montague. The younger set in Ottawa knew no such phenomena.

Looking farther afield, he next caught a glimpse of the University family, an after-growth of the larger life of Toronto 'Varsity. But he avoided that. His mind was dexterous, but needed lesser minds beside it to give it the sparkle of contrast.

In desperation he turned to the purely _nouveaux riches_, only to find that they had made entangling alliances with all the other fraternities.

There was only one well untapped--the Canadian Militia; but his mind rejected that at once. He had always agreed with Disraeli that soldiering was fit only for fools in peace-time and for barbarians in times of war.

He joined the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.

His dinner-parties on the verandas of that beautiful place caused him to be noticed. A friend of his introduced him to one of the society reporters. He invited her to a dinner, and sent her home in a limousine.

Toronto wavered. He was certainly good-looking, and had not the "_C'est entendu_" column of one of the largest dailies recorded that "Mr.

Dennis Montague's dinner-parties at the Yacht Club have a----" followed by several French words that were most impressive?