g just above the other. "Why, Ned Stillman, what
an old fraud you are! I didn't fancy you were interested in _anybody_. I
didn't think that you.... Oh, well, throw me a cigarette and let me hear
the worst in comfort!"

He opened his cigarette-case and leaned over toward her. She made her
choice. He struck a match and she put her hand tightly on his wrist as
she bent over the flame and slowly drew in her breath. Even after she
had released her grasp his flesh still bore the imprint of the rings on
her fingers. For a moment he had an impulse to bow himself out of her
presence without further explanation, but already she seemed to have a
proprietary interest in him. Her smile was full of friendly malice.

He ended by telling her everything, in spite of the conviction that he
had approached the wrong person.

"Of course," she hazarded, boldly, when he had finished, "you mean to
help her out."

Her presumption annoyed but rather refreshed him. "I'd like to do
something, but, hang it all, what can be done?"

"What can be done? If that isn't like a man! Or I should say, a
_gentleman_!... Why don't you plunge in boldly and damn the
consequences?... It's just your sort that sends women into the arms of
men like Flint. You're so busy keeping an eye on the proprieties that
you miss all the danger signals."

Her tone was extraordinarily familiar, and, to a man who rather prided
himself upon his ability to keep people at arm's-length, it was not
precisely agreeable. Yet he knew that it would be folly to give any hint
of his irritation.

"Well," he contrived to laugh back at her, "so far as I can see, Miss
Robson's problems are quite too simple. After all, it's largely a
question of money.... I can't go and throw gold in her lap as if she
were some beggar on a street corner."

"You mean, I suppose, that you are afraid to risk the outraged dignity
of this ward of yours. I think that's a lovely name for her. Don't
you?... You're acquiring such a benevolent old attitude. The only thing
to be done, I fancy, is to adopt some transparent ruse--some
sort of Daddy-Long-Leggish deception." She closed her eyes
thoughtfully--"_Hiring_ her as my accompanist, for instance." She rose
to dispense Scotch and soda. Stillman sat in thoughtful silence, while
Mrs. Condor talked to very trivial purpose. She seemed suddenly to have
grown tired of the subject of Claire Robson. The arrival of the expected
dressmaker broke in upon the rather one-si