ded tete-a-tete.

"You'll have to go," Lily Condor announced with an intimate air of
dismissal to Stillman. "It would never do to let a mere man in on the
secrets of the sewing-room."

At the door he hesitated awkwardly over his good-by. "I was wondering,"
he said, "whether you were serious about ... about hiring Miss Robson as
your accompanist. You know I think the plan has possibilities."

She threw back her head and smiled with hard satisfaction. "I've been
trying to figure if you had killed your imagination. Think it over."

She gave him the tips of her fingers. He returned their languid pressure
and departed.

As he drifted down the hall he heard her calling, half gaily, half
derisively, after him:

"Don't decide on anything rash now.... Sleep over it!..."

* * * * *

He thought it over for three days and when he called on Lily Condor
again he found her divorced from her languishing mood. She was dressed
for dinner down-town, and he had to confess she had made the most of
what remained of her flaming hair and dazzling complexion.

He felt that she guessed the reason for his visit, although she took
care to let him force the issue.

"About Miss Robson," he said, finally, "I've concluded to take you at
your word."

Lily Condor smoothed out her gloves and laid them aside. "Take me at
_my_ word? You're welcome to the suggestion, if that is what you mean.
As a matter of fact I wasn't serious."

He was annoyed to feel that he was flushing. He could not fathom her,
but he had a conviction that she _had_ been serious and that this
attitude was a mere pose. "Nevertheless, I think it can be managed," he
insisted. "And I want you to help me."

She listened to his plan. "What you will call a Daddy-Long-Leggish
pretense," he explained to her with an attempt at facetiousness. "You to
do the hiring and ... and yours truly to provide the wherewithal. Until
things look up a bit. Of course then ... why, naturally, when things
look up a bit for her...."

But Lily remained lukewarm. She wasn't quite sure that it would be ...
oh, well, he knew what she meant! It seemed too absurd to think that he
had given an ear to anything so extravagant. She would like to be of
service to Miss Robson, of course, but, after all, she felt that it was
taking an unfair advantage of the girl.

"If she's everything you say she is, she'd resent it all tremendously,"
she put forth as a final objection.

"B