ing a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite,
still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping
the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On the
young man's entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she
immediately appended: "Mr. Darrow, I can't help feeling that at heart
you're with me!"

The directness of the challenge made it easier for Darrow to protest,
and he reiterated his inability to give an opinion on either side.

"But Anna declares you have--on hers!"

He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so
scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to
attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He
had certainly promised her his help--but before he knew what he was
promising.

He met Madame de Chantelle's appeal by replying: "If there were anything
I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner's favour."

"You'd want it to be--yes! But could you make it so?"

"As far as facts go, I don't see how I can make it either for or against
her. I've already said that I know nothing of her except that she's
charming."

"As if that weren't enough--weren't all there OUGHT to be!" Miss Painter
put in impatiently. She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her
small eyes were fixed on her friend.

"Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a young
American girl ought to have a dossier--a police-record, or whatever you
call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country
it's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don't
immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list."

Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. "You
don't expect me not to ask if she's got a family?"

"No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn't. The fact that she's an
orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit. You won't have to invite
her father and mother to Givre!"

"Adelaide--Adelaide!" the mistress of Givre lamented.

"Lucretia Mary," the other returned--and Darrow spared an instant's
amusement to the quaint incongruity of the name--"you know you sent for
Mr. Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?"

"You think it's perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know
nothing about?"

"No; but I don't think it's perfectly simple to prevent him."

The shrewdness of the answer