[Footnote 8:  See advertising column, “Where to Dine Well,”
   in the daily newspapers.]

“I will take the consequences if there are to be any,” I replied.  “I am not yet come to be sandwich man for an eating-house.”

I walked over to a table where I had left my cane and gloves.  I heard the whirr of the alarm in the cab below and I turned quickly.  Van Sweller was gone.

I rushed down the stairs and out to the curb.  An empty hansom was just passing.  I hailed the driver excitedly.

“See that auto cab halfway down the block?” I shouted.  “Follow it.  Don’t lose sight of it for an instant, and I will give you two dollars!”

If I only had been one of the characters in my story instead of myself I could easily have offered $10 or $25 or even $100.  But $2 was all I felt justified in expending, with fiction at its present rates.

The cab driver, instead of lashing his animal into a foam, proceeded at a deliberate trot that suggested a by-the-hour arrangement.

But I suspected Van Sweller’s design; and when we lost sight of his cab I ordered my driver to proceed at once to ——. [9]

   [Footnote 9:  See advertising column, “Where to Dine Well,”
   in the daily newspapers.]

I found Van Sweller at a table under a palm, just glancing over the menu, with a hopeful waiter hovering at his elbow.

“Come with me,” I said, inexorably.  “You will not give me the slip again.  Under my eye you shall remain until 11:30.”

Van Sweller countermanded the order for his dinner, and arose to accompany me.  He could scarcely do less.  A fictitious character is but poorly equipped for resisting a hungry but live author who comes to drag him forth from a restaurant.  All he said was:  “You were just in time; but I think you are making a mistake.  You cannot afford to ignore the wishes of the great reading public.”

I took Van Sweller to my own rooms—­to my room.  He had never seen anything like it before.

“Sit on that trunk,” I said to him, “while I observe whether the landlady is stalking us.  If she is not, I will get things at a delicatessen store below, and cook something for you in a pan over the gas jet.  It will not be so bad.  Of course nothing of this will appear in the story.”

“Jove! old man!” said Van Sweller, looking about him with interest, “this is a jolly little closet you live in!  Where the devil do you sleep?—­Oh, that pulls down!  And I say—­what is this under the corner of the carpet?—­Oh, a frying pan!  I see—­clever idea!  Fancy cooking over the gas!  What larks it will be!”

“Think of anything you could eat?” I asked; “try a chop, or what?”

“Anything,” said Van Sweller, enthusiastically, “except a grilled bone.”

Two weeks afterward the postman brought me a large, fat envelope.  I opened it, and took out something that I had seen before, and this typewritten letter from a magazine that encourages society fiction: