Her enthusiasm was contagious.  Johnny himself was glad.  It seemed like a terrific waste of time to have to wait a month before he could tell her what he thought of her; but he had to have that million!

“You’re a careful score keeper,” he complimented her.  “I’ll go right after that property.  Does the item say who controls it now?”

“I have the paper before me.  I’ll read you the names,” she returned with businesslike preparedness:  “Mr. James Jameson-Guff, Mr. G. W. Mason, Mr. Martin Sheats, Mr. Edward Kettle.”

“All the neighbors,” he commented.  “They don’t like honest working-girls, I guess.  That’s a fine crowd of information you’ve handed me.  I ought to give you a partnership in that million.”

“You just run along or you’ll be too late!” she urged him.  “I’ll take my commission in the five-thousand-dollar hours you donate to the Babies’ Fund Fair.  By the way, from whom do you suppose that option was purchased?”

“Gresham?” inquired Johnny promptly and with such a thrill of startled intensity in his tone that Constance could not repress a giggle.

“No, James Collaton,” she informed him.  “That’s all the news.  Hurry, now!  Report to me, won’t you, as soon as you find out whether you can secure the property?  I haven’t made an entry on my score board since last Wednesday night.  Good-by.”

“Good-by,” said Johnny reluctantly; but he held the telephone open, trying to think of something else to say until he heard the click which told him that she had hung up.

Last Wednesday night!  Why, that was the night he had given the dinner in celebration of his passing the quarter-of-a-million mark; and after he had taken her home from the dinner she had sat up to rule and mark that elaborate score board!  Somehow his lungs felt very light and buoyant.

Collaton, though?  How did he get into the deal?  Suddenly Johnny remembered Val Russel’s joking at the committee meeting.  Gresham again!

“Loring, I don’t think I can wait till June first to get after the scalps of Gresham and Collaton,” he declared as he prepared to go out.  “I want to soak them now.”

James Jameson-Guff, so christened by his wife, but more familiarly known among his associates as Jim Guff, received Johnny with a frown when he understood his errand.

“You’re too late,” he told Johnny.  “We’ve turned the option over to our wives to do with as they pleased.  We’re to have a swell yacht club out there now.  I think that’s a graft, too!”

“If you get stung again, Mr. Guff, let me know,” offered Johnny, “and I’ll have you a bona fide apartment-house proposition in short order.”

“Nyagh!” observed Mr. Guff.

Johnny dutifully reported to his score keeper the result of his errand and, that evening, to explain it more fully he went out to her house; but he found Gresham there and nobody had a very good time.

On the following morning he saw in the papers that the Royal Yacht Club, a new organization, the moving spirit of which was one Michael T. O’Shaunessy, was to have magnificent headquarters on Riverside Drive—­and he immediately went to see Mr. Guff.  Mike O’Shaunessy was a notorious proprietor of road houses and “clubs” of shady reputation, and there was no question as to what sort of place the Royal Yacht Club would be.