



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Walt Farrell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)








  THE BANDBOX




  BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

    The Bandbox
    Cynthia-of-the-Minute
    No Man's Land
    The Fortune Hunter
    The Pool of Flame
    The Bronze Bell
    The Black Bag
    The Brass Bowl
    The Private War
    Terence O'Rourke


[Illustration: "Now, sir!" she exclaimed, turning

                      FRONTISPIECE. _See Page 83_]




 The Bandbox

 BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

 Author of "The Brass Bowl," "The Bronze Bell,"
 "Cynthia-of-the-Minute," etc.


 With Four Illustrations
 By ARTHUR I. KELLER


 A. L. BURT COMPANY
 Publishers      New York


 _Copyright, 1911, 1912,_
 By Louis Joseph Vance.

 _All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign
 languages, including the Scandinavian_

 Published, April, 1912
 Reprinted, April, 1912 (three times)


 TO
 LEWIS BUDDY III




 CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                               PAGE

    I INTRODUCING MR. IFF                 1

   II THE BANDBOX                        14

  III TWINS                              26

   IV QUEENSTOWN                         43

    V ISMAY?                             65

   VI IFF?                               87

  VII STOLE AWAY!                       109

 VIII THE WRONG BOX                     128

   IX A LIKELY STORY                    158

    X DEAD O' NIGHT                     177

   XI THE COLD GREY DAWN                194

  XII WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?   216

 XIII WRECK ISLAND                      233

  XIV THE STRONG-BOX                    254

   XV THE ENEMY'S HAND                  275

  XVI NINETY MINUTES                    295

 XVII HOLOCAUST                         312




THE BANDBOX

I

INTRODUCING MR. IFF


At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of
August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the
Authors' Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of
cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the
death-in-life of sheer ennui.

A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast:
he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely;
he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn't look _that_)
and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in
London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill at ease in
the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.

Inconceivable as it may seem that any rational man should yearn for New
York in August, that and nothing less was what Staff wanted with all his
heart. He wanted to go home and swelter and be swindled by taxicab
drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; he wanted to patronise the
subway at peril of asphyxiation and to walk down Fifth Avenue at that
witching hour when electric globes begin to dot the dusk of
evening--pale moons of a world of steel and stone; he wanted to ride in
elevators instead of lifts, in trolley-cars instead of trams; he wanted
to go to a ball-game at the Polo Grounds, to dine dressed as he pleased,
to insult his intelligence with a roof-garden show if he felt so
disposed, and to see for himself just how much of Town had been torn
down in the two months of his exile and what they were going to put up
in its place. He wanted, in short, his own people; more specifically he
wanted just one of them, meaning to marry her if she'd have him.

Now to be homesick and lovesick all at once is a tremendously disturbing
state of affairs. So influenced, the strongest men are prone to folly.
Staff, for instance, had excellent reason to doubt the advisability of
leaving London just then, with an unfinished play on his hands; but he
was really no more than a mere, normal human being, and he did want very
badly to go home. If it was a sharp struggle, it was a