The House With Three Eyes sent forth into the darkness a triple glow of hospitality. Through the aloof Chelsea district street, beyond the westernmost L structure, came taxicabs, hansoms, private autos, to discharge at the central door men who were presently revealed, under the lucent globe above the lintel, to be for the most part silhouette studies in the black of festal tailoring and silk hat against the white of expansive shirt-front. Occasionally, though less often, one of the doors at either flank of the house, also overwatched by shining orbs, opened to discharge an early departure. A midnight wayfarer, pausing opposite to contemplate this inexplicable grandeur in a dingy neighborhood, sought enlightenment from the passing patrolman:

"Wot's doin'? Swell gamblin' joint? Huh?" As he spoke a huge, silent car crept swiftly to the entry, which opened to swallow up two bareheaded, luxuriously befurred women, with their escorts. The curious wayfarer promptly amended his query, though not for the better.

"Naw!" replied the policeman with scorn. "That's Mr. Banneker's house."

"Banneker? Who's Banneker?"

With augmented contempt the officer requested the latest quotations on clover seed. "He's the editor of The Patriot," he vouchsafed. "A millionaire, too, they say. And a good sport."

"Givin' a party, huh?"

"Every Saturday night," answered he of the uniform and night-stick, who, having participated below-stairs in the reflections of the entertainment, was condescending enough to be informative. "Say, the swellest folks in New York fall over themselves to get invited here."

"Why ain't he on Fi'th Avenyah, then?" demanded the other.

"He makes the Fi'th Avenyah bunch come to him," explained the policeman, with obvious pride. "Took a couple of these old houses on long lease, knocked out the walls, built 'em into one, on his own plan, and, say! It's a pallus! I been all through it."

A lithely powerful figure took the tall steps of the house three at a time, and turned, under the light, to toss away a cigar.

"Cheest!" exclaimed the wayfarer in tones of awe: "that's K.O. Doyle, the middleweight, ain't it?"

"Sure! That's nothin'. If you was to get inside there you'd bump into some of the biggest guys in town; a lot of high-ups from Wall Street, and maybe a couple of these professors from Columbyah College, and some swell actresses, and a bunch of high-brow writers and painters, and a dozen dames right off the head of the Four Hundred list. He takes 'em, all kinds, Mr. Banneker does, just so they're _somethin_'. He's a wonder."

The wayfarer passed on to his oniony boarding-house, a few steps along, deeply marveling at the irruption of magnificence into the neighborhood in the brief year since he had been away.

Equipages continued to draw up, unload, and withdraw, until twelve thirty, when, without so much as a preliminary wink, the House shut its Three Eyes. A scant five minutes earlier, an alert but tired-looking man, wearing the slouch hat of the West above his dinner coat, had briskly mounted the steps and, after colloquy with the cautious, black guardian of the door, had been admitted to a side room, where he was presently accosted by a graying, spare-set guest with ruminative eyes.

"I heard about this show by accident, and wanted in," explained the newcomer in response to the other's look of inquiry. "If I could see Banneker--"

"It will be some little time before you can see him. He's at work."

"But this is his party, isn't it?"

"Yes. The party takes care of itself until he comes down."

"Oh; does it? Well, will it take care of me?"

"Are you a friend of Mr. Banneker's?"

"In a way. In fact, I might claim to have started him on his career of newspaper crime. I'm Gardner of the Angelica City Herald."

"Ban will be glad to see you. Take off your things. I am Russell Edmonds."

He led the way into a spacious and beautiful room, filled with the composite hum of voices and the scent of half-hidden flowers. The Westerner glanced avidly about him, noting here a spoken name familiar in print, there a face recognized from far-spread photographic reproduction.

"Some different from Ban's shack on the desert," he muttered. "Hello! Mr. Edmonds, who's the splendid-looking woman in brown with the yellow orchids, over there in the seat back of the palms?"

Edmonds leaned forward to look. "Royce Melvin, the composer, I believe. I haven't met her."

"I have, then," returned the other, as the guest changed her position, fully revealing her face. "Tried to dig some information out of her once. Like picking prickly pears blindfold. That's Camilla Van Arsdale. What a coincidence to find her here!"

"No! Camilla Van Arsdale? You'll excuse me, won't you? I want to speak to her. Make yourself known to any one you like the looks of. That's the rule of the house; no introductions."

He walked across the room, made his way through the crescent curving about Miss Van Arsdale, and, presenting himself, was warmly greeted.

"Let me take you to Ban," he said. "He'll want to see you at once."

"But won't it disturb his work?"

"Nothing does. He writes with an open door and a shut brain."

He led her up the east flight of stairs and down a long hallway to an end room with door ajar, notwithstanding that even at that distance the hum of voices and the muffled throbbing of the concert grand piano from below were plainly audible. Banneker's voice, regular, mechanical, desensitized as the voices of those who dictate habitually are prone to become, floated out:

"Quote where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise end quote comma said a poet who was also a cynic period. Many poets are comma but not the greatest period. Because of their--turn back to the beginning of the paragraph, please, Miss Westlake."

"I've brought up an old friend, Ban," announced Edmonds, pushing wide the door.

Vaguely smiling, for he had trained himself to be impervious to interruptions, the editorializer turned in his chair. Instantly he sprang to his feet, and caught Miss Van Arsdale by both hands.

"Miss Camilla!" he cried. "I thought you said you couldn't come."

"I'm defying the doctors," she replied. "They've given me so good a report of myself that I can afford to. I'll go down now and wait for you."

"No; don't. Sit up here with me till I finish. I don't want to lose any of you," said he affectionately.

But she laughingly refused, declaring that he would be through all the sooner for his other guests, if she left him.

"See that she meets some people, Bop," Banneker directed. "Gaines of The New Era, if he's here, and Betty Raleigh, and that new composer, and the Junior Masters."

Edmonds nodded, and escorted her downstairs. Nicely judging the time when Banneker would have finished, he was back in quarter of an hour. The stenographer had just left.

"What a superb woman, Ban!" he said. "It's small wonder that Enderby lost himself."

Banneker nodded. "What would she have said if she could know that you, an absolute stranger, had been the means of saving her from a terrific scandal? Gives one a rather shivery feeling about the power and responsibility of the press, doesn't it?"

"It would have been worse than murder," declared the veteran, with so much feeling that his friend gave him a grateful look. "What's she doing in New York? Is it safe?"

"Came on to see a specialist. Yes; it's all right. The Enderbys are abroad."

"I see. How long since you'd seen her?"

"Before this trip? Last spring, when I took a fortnight off."

"You went clear West, just to see her?"

"Mainly. Partly, too, to get back to the restfulness of the place where I never had any troubles. I've kept the little shack I used to own; pay a local chap named Mindle to keep it in shape. So I just put in a week of quiet there."

"You're a queer chap, Ban. And a loyal one."

"If I weren't loyal to Camilla Van Arsdale--" said Banneker, and left the implication unconcluded.

"Another friend from your picturesque past is down below," said Edmonds, and named Gardner.

"Lord! That fellow nearly cost me my life, last time we met," laughed Banneker. Then his face altered. Pain drew its sharp lines there, pain and the longing of old memories still unassuaged. "Just the same, I'll be glad to see him."

He sought out the Californian, found him deep in talk with Guy Mallory of The Ledger, who had come in late, gave him hearty greeting, and looked about for Camilla Van Arsdale. She was supping in the center of a curiously assorted group, part of whom remembered the old romance of her life, and part of whom had identified her, by some chance, as Royce Melvin, the composer. All of them were paying court to her charm and intelligence. She made a place beside herself for Banneker.

"We've been discussing The Patriot, Ban," she said, "and Mr. Gaines has embalmed you, as an editorial writer, in the amber of one of his best epigrams."

The Great Gaines made a deprecating gesture. "My little efforts always sound better when I'm not present," he protested.

"To be the subject of any Gaines epigram, however stinging, is fame in itself," said Banneker.

"And no sting in this one. 'Attic salt and American pep,'" she quoted. "Isn't it truly spicy?"

Banneker bowed with half-mocking appreciation. "I fancy, though, that Mr. Gaines prefers his journalistic egg more _au naturel_."

"Sometimes," admitted the most famous of magazine editors, "I could dispense with some of the pep."

"I like the pep, too, Ban." Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice. "I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them. But the rest of the paper--Oh, dear! It screeches."

"Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it," said Banneker pleasantly.

"Isn't it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?" suggested the mathematician.

"Shouting against each other," said Gaines.

"Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows," put in Junior Masters.

"Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?" inquired Betty.

"Wouldn't sell a ticket," declared Banneker.

"Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find," pointed out Edmonds, "the effect will pall."

"Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow's war whoop," surmised Masters.

"I have never particularly admired the steam calliope as a form of expression," observed Miss Van Arsdale.

"Ah!" said the actress, smiling, "but Royce Melvin doesn't make music for circuses."

"And a modern newspaper is a circus," pronounced the satyr-like scholar.

"Three-ring variety; all the latest stunts; list to the voice of the ballyhoo," said Masters.

"_Panem et circenses_" pursued the mathematician, pleased with his simile, "to appease the howling rabble. But it is mostly circus, and very little bread that our emperors of the news give us."

"We've got to feed what the animal eats," defended Banneker lightly.

"After having stimulated an artificial appetite," said Edmonds.

As the talk flowed on, Betty Raleigh adroitly drew Banneker out of the current of it. "Your Patriot needn't have screeched at me, Ban," she murmured in an injured tone.

"Did it, Betty? How, when, and where?"

"I thought you were horridly patronizing about the new piece, and quite unkind to me, for a friend."

"It wasn't my criticism, you know," he reminded her patiently. "I don't write the whole paper, though most of my acquaintances seem to think that I do. Any and all of it to which they take exception, at least."

"............