have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he
ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything
else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a
lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so,
too."

"You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer,"
said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum
of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had
stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He
invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he
tried to realise."

"I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty."

"Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her
unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.

"He might, to save somebody else."

Esther was staring now and Lydia stared back, caught by the almost
terrified surprise in Esther's face. Did she know about Jim Reardon? But
Esther broke the silence, not in confession, if she did know: with
violence rather.

"You never will prove any such thing. Never in the world. The money was
in Jeff's hands. He hadn't even a partner."

"He had friends," said Lydia. But now she felt she had implied more than
was discreet, and she put a sign up mentally not to go that way.
Whatever Esther said, she would keep her own eyes on the sign.

IV

Still she returned to the assault. Her next question even made her raise
her brows a little, it seemed so crude and horrible; she could have
laughed outright at herself for having the nerve to put it. She couldn't
imagine what the colonel would have thought of her. Anne, she knew,
would have crumpled up into silken disaster like a flower under too
sharp a wind.

"Aren't you going to ask Jeff here to live with you?"

Esther was looking at her in a fiery amaze Lydia knew she well deserved.
"Who is this child," Esther seemed to be saying, "rising up out of
nowhere and pursuing me into my most intimate retreats?" She answered in
a careful hedging way that was not less pretty than her unconsidered
speech:

"Jeffrey and I haven't been in communication for years."

Then Lydia lost her temper and put herself in the wrong.

"Why," said she, "you said that before. Besides, it's no answer anyway.
You could have written to him, and as soon as you heard he was going to
be pardoned, you could have made your plans. Don't you mean