red of acting.
I'd like to leave the stage in a blaze of glory while everybody wants me
and there's no one to take my place. There's only one trouble--I'm so
horribly extravagant. I always have been. I'm afraid I always shall be.
I make heaps of money, but I can't save. If I say good-bye to the
theatre, I shall want millions. I don't feel I can rub along on less. So
that means--I shall have to marry somebody else's millions, for I
haven't got the ghost of one of my own."

As she explained her position she looked deliberately past Somerled and
out at the window. This made me sure that a vague suspicion of mine was
founded on fact. Mrs. Bal had angled for Somerled, and he had been one
of her few failures. She couldn't be pleased at encountering him again
as her daughter's self-appointed guardian and champion. It seemed to me
that the situation complicated itself, to Somerled's disadvantage;
therefore--it might be--to the advantage of the next nearest man,
myself.

"There is some one," Mrs. Bal went on, with a slight but lessening
constraint, "who--rather likes me, and I rather like him--better than I
can remember liking anybody. He's got lots of money. His name is Morgan
Bennett. Somerled--you know him."

"Yes," said Somerled. "I thought his back looked familiar."

So the big fellow who helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in
proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P.
Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of
millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's
pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful
speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P.
Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin--and unlimited cheek. He is
so big that his pet name in Wall Street used to be "The Little Tin
Soldier."

"He has been--dangling lately," Mrs. Bal went on. "Oh, nothing settled!
I confess I wish it were. I mean to take him if he asks me, and I think
he will. You wouldn't believe it, but he's a shy man with women. I do
believe he's frightened to propose. He's bought a house in London, in my
favourite square. And now he's taken a shooting-lodge in
Forfarshire--such an amusing place: a huge round house with as many eyes
as in a peacock's tail, all staring cheerfully, and high chimneys
grouped together like bundles of asparagus. I've just been staying there
with his sister, Mrs. Payne, whom I believe he i