of a man in a minute," he said, thinking I'd
grown impatient.

"Never mind a man!" I snapped. "Never mind anything!"

"Not even your hats?" he laughed.

"_Hang_ my hats! Oh, Jack, Pat's father's ruined, and that Caspian
creature is telling her--unless we can stop him. Do come!"

Jack came. But we were too late. The roses on Pat's cheeks were already
snowed under when we hurled ourselves at "M." They both turned as we
came up, she and he together. I wasted only one glance on Mr.
Caspian--just enough to see that he was a small man perfectly turned out
by his tailor and fairly well by his Maker: all the upper part of a
blond head and face rather beautiful and idealistic, the lower part not
so good, might even be a rude contradiction. Then my eyes went to Pat's,
which were more sapphire-like than ever, because they glittered behind
tears that she'd have died rather than let fall. By not winking she had
induced the tear-vessels to take back a few, and the process would go on
satisfactorily, I was sure, if nothing untoward intervened.

"Have you and Mr. Winston met Mr. Caspian?" she asked, as formally as at
a school reception for teaching young girls How to Succeed in Society.
Her lips were white and moved stiffly, as lips do when they are cold,
though the day was mild as milk. "Mr. Caspian says he knows Larry
slightly, and--and--that he's in great trouble."

"I'm awfully sorry to be a bearer of ill tidings," Ed Caspian defended
himself to Jack and me, "but Miss Moore was worrying--when Mrs. Shuster
introduced us--because her father hadn't come to meet her, and I thought
it would perhaps be best----"

Well, I won't bother you, Mercedes, dear, with all the "we saids" and
"he saids." We--that is, Jack and I--soon realized that Caspian knew
what he knew about "Larry's" affairs by hearsay, or from the newspapers.
He was scarcely acquainted with Larry himself: had only met him at
houses of mutual friends. Laurence Moore had come a regular cropper, it
seemed. Things had been faring badly with him for some time "because he
was no business man, and fellows were always persuading him to go into
rotten things." "But we'll see him through, Miss Moore, we'll see him
through," Mr. Caspian finished up. "Don't be unhappy. And I see in the
papers that the fine old house is yours and can't be sold. Your father
made it over to you legally, years ago. So that's all right, isn't it?"

"Have--have things been in the papers about us?" ask