or trouble that is threatening to
smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let
me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."

Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent
with tobacco smoke.

"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length.
"After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the
position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned
if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I _can't_ ask
Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."

"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may
feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The
thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way----"

"I am putting it precisely that way."

"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be
putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"

Griswold was inexorable.

"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any
father--better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it
that she gets a square deal."

"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she
wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer----"

"That is it, exactly."

"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"

"I am," was the cool reply.

"Well, of all the-- Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me
yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying,
but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my
goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good
as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."

"It isn't--yet."

"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little
garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you
put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like
to be putting it on Madge Grierson's----"

Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.

"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he
suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this
shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I
shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or
Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."