as part of their joke that Dan's coming to him always meant
something decisive in his experiences. The reporter was at his late
breakfast, which his landlady furnished him in his room, though, as Mrs.
Mash said, she never gave meals, but a cup of coffee and an egg or two,
yes.

"Well?" he said, without looking up.

"Well, I'm done for!" cried Dan.

"Again?" asked Boardman.

"Again! The other time was nothing, Boardman--I knew it wasn't anything;
but this--this is final."

"Go on," said Boardman, looking about for his individual salt-cellar,
which he found under the edge of his plate; and Mavering laid the
whole case before him. As he made no comment on it for a while, Dan
was obliged to ask him what he thought of it. "Well," he said, with the
smile that showed the evenness of his pretty teeth, "there's a kind of
wild justice in it." He admitted this, with the object of meeting Dan's
views in an opinion.

"So you think I'm a faithless man too, do you?" demanded Mavering
stormily.

"Not from your point of view," said Boardman, who kept on quietly eating
and drinking.

Mavering was too amiable not to feel Boardman's innocence of offence in
his unperturbed behaviour. "There was no faithlessness about it, and you
know it," he went on, half laughing, half crying, in his excitement, and
making Boardman the avenue of an appeal really addressed to Alice. "I
was ready to do what either side decided."

"Or both," suggested Boardman.

"Yes, or both," said Dan, boldly accepting the suggestion. "It wouldn't
have cost me a pang to give up if I'd been in the place of either."

"I guess that's what she could never understand," Boardman mused aloud.

"And I could never understand how any one could fail to see that that
was what I intended--expected: that it would all come out right of
itself--naturally." Dan was still addressing Alice in this belated
reasoning. "But to be accused of bad faith--of trying to deceive any
one--"

"Pretty rough," said Boardman.

"Rough? It's more than I can stand!"

"Well, you don't seem to be asked to stand it," said Boardman, and
Mavering laughed forlornly with him at his joke, and then walked away
and looked out of Boardman's dormer-window on the roofs below,
with their dirty, smoke-stained February snow. He pulled out his
handkerchief, and wiped his face with it. When he turned round, Boardman
looked keenly at him, and asked, with an air of caution, "And so it's
all up?"

"Yes, it's