e chances of the future," he said
slowly. "He won't continue to like me, I'm afraid. Just now he thinks of
us both as children. I am only your overgrown playmate--but realization
will come--and then--"

"You think that he will change?"

"I know it."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and fell silent, but after a pause she spoke again
impulsively, with a note of fear in her voice. "You won't go away and
leave me here alone, will you--even if nobody else likes you?"

"No one but you can send me away--" he declared almost fiercely, "and
before you can do it you must prove yourself stronger than I."

She gave a little sigh of relief and fell to talking of other things. It
was when he rose to go and she walked to his car with him that he asked
with seeming irrelevance, "Has this Mr. Tollman ever--made love to you?"

She burst, at that, into a gale of laughter more spontaneous than any he
had heard since the telegram had sobered her. It was as though the
absurdity of the idea had swept the sky clear of everything but comedy.

"Made love to me!" she mockingly echoed. "Honestly, Stuart, there are
times when you are the funniest mortal alive--and it's always when
you're most serious. Picture the Sphinx growing garrulous. Picture
Napoleon seeking retreat in a monastery--but don't try to visualize Mr.
Tollman making love."

"Perhaps I'm premature," announced Farquaharson with conviction. "But
I'm not mistaken. If he hasn't made love to you, he will."

"Wherefore this burst of prophecy?"

"I don't have to be prophetic. I saw him look at you--and I didn't like
the way he did it. That man thinks he loves you."

"If so, he hasn't mentioned it to me."

"He will--I say 'thinks' he loves you," Stuart persisted in a level and
somewhat contemptuous voice, "because I don't believe he can really love
anything but himself and his money. But in a grasping, avaricious way he
wants you. His eyes betrayed him. He wants you in the fashion that a
miser wants gold. He wants you in the way a glutton wants a peach which
he has deliberately watched ripen until finally he says to himself,
'It's about ready to pick now.'"

A more intimate view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial
dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was
added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the
business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the
invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guid