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 step over. How simple a step of escape from all complication, to step with her over the edge and drop down, down with her.

He opened his eyes and shook it off. She lost her moment; she knew it and arose.

From the window, she inquired, "How in heaven did you happen to wish us into this place?"

Not yet did Jay recollect. He had no mind for memory of a trifle, at the time so inconsequential and unconnected with his fate, as the chance which had caused him to recommend Tryston, in his father's office, to Philip Metten.

Mr. Phil Metten also might have forgotten, or at least have neglected, the recommendation, had he not been reminded of it by the newspaper which he opened at his breakfast table on Christmas morning. Upor the picture page (to which Mr. Metten turned after a glance atethe headlines had reassured him that no disaster immediately menacing to money rates had happened overnight) was the portrait of an unusually smart-looking society girl.

New York society girl, the paper designated her; and as such, Mr. Metten admired and, in the cause of his own womenfolk, coveted her smartness. Without having noticed the newspaper's guarantee of her, Mr. Metten himself would have seen that she was in real "society." He flattered himself that he could set apart at a glance on the Avenue, and almost as infallibly upon a picture page, the authentic from the spurious; the blue-blood society girl from the Follies girl or even the bankermarried ex-Follies girl, though she obtained from the