When hard times were at their hardest it was customary for the newspapers to say that Horace Laghet had all the money in the country. His name was on every lip; the least of his doings and sayings constituted front-page stuff.He first came into prominence during the panic of 1929, when it transpired that he had sold short. Of course he made millions. And after that, when everybody else was desperately trying to revive confidence, Laghet continued to sell America short, and America, unfortunately, justified his disbelief. He raked in more and more millions.He spent lavishly. At a time when the building trades were almost at a standstill he commenced the construction of a huge marble palace on upper Fifth Avenue, and another at Newport. He ordered a yacht that was to exceed any yacht ever built. When these extravagances were criticized he retorted: “Well, I’m keeping the money in circulation, am I not?” And there was no come-back.

Fay Brunton was one of those stars who suddenly shine out on Broadway in full effulgence, and are almost as quickly darkened. Most people will remember her name, but I doubt if many could name the parts in which she appeared. But to those of us who knew her, she remains a vivid and lovely memory; she was so beautiful! And that was not all of it; beauty is not uncommon on Broadway: it was her great sweetness of nature that endeared her to us; her girlishness; her simplicity. She was not a great actress; her smile was her passport to popular favour.My employer, Madame Storey, who knows everybody in the great world, had become acquainted with Fay, and through her I had met the girl. By degrees, I can hardly say how, Fay and I had become intimate friends. She brought colour and incident into my life. To a plain Jane like me, she was marvellous. I was the recipient of all her charming confidences—or nearly all; and as well as I could, I steered her with my advice amongst the pitfalls that beset a popular favourite. For one in the limelight she was incredibly ignorant of evil. And you could not bear to show her the ugly side of life.

The Teresa de Guion case, owing to the extraordinary prominence of the persons concerned, raised Mme. Storey to the very pinnacle of her fame; and she (as well as myself in my humbler capacity) had to pay the penalty of the attendant publicity. All day long our offices were thronged by the most diverse collection of human beings, ranging from bank presidents and society leaders all the way down to the cranks and semi-lunatics that make themselves known at such a time. These people made the oddest demands upon my mistress; or requests for her aid; or appeals to her sympathy. Some wanted to divorce their mates; others to win back an erring husband or wife. Many persons, otherwise sane, firmly believed that they were being persecuted by an unknown enemy; others seemed to fancy that my mistress was a sort of soothsayer with magical powers. Still others, and this was the most numerous class of all, had not the shadow of an excuse for troubling us, except the desire to edge into the limelight that was beating so fiercely on Mme. Storey. Such were the hostesses who wished to ask her to dinner; and the gentlemen who, roused by the extraordinary beauty of her published photographs, desired to ask her to dinners of another sort.

I cannot better put that extraordinary woman, my employer, before you than by describing my first meeting with her. It is easier to show her qualities in action than to describe them.On a certain morning, no different from thousands of other mornings, I was in a subway train on my way to the office when my eye was caught by this striking advertisement:WANTED—By a woman of affairs, a woman secretary; common sense is the prime requisite.  Printed words have an extraordinary effect on one sometimes. Something in these terse phrases so strongly appealed to me that though I had a very good position at the time, I interrupted my journey to the office and went directly to the address given.

It was on the very morning of Mme Storey's sailing for Paris for her annual vacation that Mrs. Daniel Greenfield came to our office. When I heard the name she gave I looked at her with an extraordinary interest. One of our most famous philanthropists, her name is on everybody's lips, but as she has always refused to allow a photograph of herself to be published, scarcely anybody knows what she looks like.Well, I beheld an exquisite little old lady who looked more like a French marquise than the wife of an American millionaire. Decidedly a personality. She was so fragile she was obliged to support herself with an ebony stick, nevertheless, not an old lady who was asking for the consideration due to age. She met you on your own ground. Her dark eyes were still full of spirit, yes, and of beauty too, though she must have been close upon seventy. Her lovely clothes drew a nice line between the dignity of an older fashion and the modishness of the new. All in black, of course, for her husband was lately dead, but she eschewed the ostentatious widow's veil. She was accompanied by a nurse, or companion, a pleasant-faced woman, who had nothing of the usual dehumanized look of those who wait upon the rich. She was unaffectedly devoted to her mistress, which is something money can't usually buy.

I was crossing Union Square on my way to the office thinking about nothing at all, when I received one of those curious psychical shocks that the sight of an unknown face will sometimes give one. This was a young man sitting on a bench with his long legs stretched before him, and his hands thrust deep into his overcoat pockets. He was out of luck—well, all the benchers in November are out of luck; this one bore it with a difference. His chin was not sunk on his breast, but held level, and his gentian-blue eyes were staring straight before him with an expression of complete despair.My impulse was to speak to him. I suppressed it, of course, and kept on. How quickly one learns to suppress ones natural impulses in town! But this one was not going to be so easily suppressed. It set up a painful agitation in my breast. Coward! Coward! a still small voice whispered to me. How about the Good Samaritan? Here is a fellow-creature suffering some wound infinitely more dreadful than wounds of the flesh, and you pass by on the other side!

The long envelope inclosed something crisp and firm that immediately suggested bank notes. Madame Storey has taught me to notice such things. The messenger who brought it required a receipt in her own hand. After I had handed him his receipt and returned to my employer's room, I saw the bills scattered on her desk: five smooth, fresh, orange-backed engravings direct from the Federal Reserve Bank, the prettiest pictures on earth. They were thousand-dollar bills, the first I had ever seen. Those five scraps of paper were equivalent to a trip around the world, a high-powered car, or any delightful folly that one might dream about. To me it was a lot of money.Mme. Storey was reading the letter which had accompanied it. Seeing me goggle at the money, she said airily: "That's only our retaining fee, Bella. There is ten times as much in this case, if we can pull it off. Besides an unlimited expense account."

Mme Storey drove her own car up to Newport. According to instructions, we left it standing at the front door of the Van Tassel mansion, and made our way by a path around to the rear. This was to avoid coming in contact with the house servants.In the darkness under the side windows our way was suddenly blocked by an armed guard. The unexpectedness of his appearance almost fetched a scream out of me. In a husky whisper he demanded to know our business. Mme. Storey gave him the password that had been furnished us—“Redwood”—and he drew back. I had the feeling that other men were watching us from the shadows of the shrubbery. Who would want to be rich, I thought, if you had to live in a state of siege like this.At the back of the mansion, looking over the cliffs toward the sea, there was a wide outdoors room that would have been called a porch in any ordinary house, but at the Van Tassels', we learned, it was dignified with the name of terrace. It was glassed in all around for bad weather, and though now the June night was warm and sweet smelling, all the sliding panels were closed. Here Mr. and Mrs. Van Tassel had arranged to be waiting for us.

Neill didn’t hold with his girl Janet running around with Prescott Fanning. He reckoned Fanning wasn’t straight and said so, but you know what girls are. . . . So Neill had to prove his words, and in doing so found trouble soon enough. Janet went off with Fanning, and the next time Neill saw her he found her in a faint with blood on her cheek, a revolver by her side, and Fanning dead at her feet. After that it was a question of the fox hunting with the hounds, and there’s suspense and excitement at every turn.

Dick Shemwell found himself in London, three thousand miles from home. He didn't have a penny and he didn't know a soul. He had tried honesty all his life; now he was ready to take a shot at crookedness. As he sat dejectedly in a hotel lobby, his face must have showed his thoughts, for five minutes later he had been invited to participate in an adventure that was to keep him that one jump ahead of violent death for some time to come. Hired by a band of crooks to steal a pearl necklace from another crook who had stolen it from still another crook, he found himself whiled all over England, across the ocean and back again, the target of police and criminals alike, till a desperate battle solved the situation and set him right in the eyes of the law