Hilmer's puzzling benevolence. One jam in
the wheel and everything halted. He thought the whole matter out. He
was still what Hilmer had intimated on the night of that disturbing
dinner party--a creature with a back bent by continual bowing and
scraping--a full-grown man with standards inherited instead of
acquired. Why didn't he go around to the office of Ford, Wetherbee &
Co. and beat up his nasty little ex-partner? Why didn't he meet
Kendrick's gumshoe activities with equal stealth? It should have been
possible to snare Kendrick if one had the guts. And why accept a
gratuity from Hilmer in the shape of two thousand dollars more or less
for commissions on business that one never really had earned the right
to? He began to suspect that Hilmer had instructed his cashier to pay
the companies direct. It was probably his patron's way of forcing home
the idea that the commissions _were_ a gratuity. No doubt even now he
was chuckling at the spectacle of Starratt running about the street
picking up the doles. He decided, once and for all, that he wouldn't
go on being an object of satirical charity. He wouldn't refuse the
Hilmer business, but he would put it on the proper basis. He would put
a proposition squarely up to Hilmer whereby Hilmer would become a
definite partner in the firm--Hilmer, Starratt & Co., to be exact.
This would mean not only an opportunity to handle all the Hilmer
business itself, but to control other insurance that Hilmer had his
finger in. There would be no silent partners, no gratuitous assistance
from either clients or wife, no evasions. From this moment on
everything was to be upon a frank and open basis.

He went out at once to see Hilmer. His wife answered the door as she
had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the
night before. He had a sense of intrusion--he felt that he was being
tolerated. Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked
very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb. He
noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the
mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely
to the polished surface of the oak piano. A magazine sprawled face
downward on the floor. Already the impress of Mrs. Hilmer on the
surroundings was becoming a trifle blurred.

He came at once to the point--he had a business proposition to make to
Hilmer and he wished to see him.

But Helen was not to be excluded from the secret