!" I protested. "I don't want him to marry her.
Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here
to see for herself?"

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight.
Coming? When?

"Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself."

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned,
searchingly, to me. "You didn't make that up?"

I laughed, and explained. "Some of them, at any rate," I finished, "know
what she's coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought."

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the
flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. "They
wouldn't tell you?"

"I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and
remembered just in time that I didn't know about it."

"But since you do know pretty much about it!" she laughed.

I shook my head. "There's something else, something that's turned up;
the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that
you'd know."

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and
then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.--

"They don't talk to me."

It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident
genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant
me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet,
as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware
of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on
High Walk had held me off.

"Well," I sighed, "I pin my faith to the aunt who says he'll never marry
her."

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. "Haven't you forgotten
something?" she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left
behind--"I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day."

"I clean forgot it!"

"No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply
ready."

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following
me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was
thinking of something else.

XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was
the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner
wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed
point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in
spots all alo