m,' as you put it. Besides, this isn't Yellow Dog Gulch. They
hang people here."

"You little she-devil! If you push me into this thing, you'd better get
Raymer, or somebody, to take you in. You'll be out in the street!"

"I have thought of that, too," she said, coolly; "about quitting you.
I'm sick of it all--the getting and the spending and the crookedness.
I'd put the money--yours and mine--in a pile and set fire to it, if some
decent man would give me a calico dress and a chance to cook for two."

"Raymer, for instance?" the father cut in, in heavy mockery.

"Mr. Raymer has asked me to marry him, if you care to know," she struck
back.

"Oho! So that's the milk in the cocoanut, is it? You sold me out to buy
in with him!"

"You may put it that way, if you like; I don't care." She was drawing on
her driving-gloves methodically and working the fingers into place, and
there were sullen fires in the brooding eyes.

"I've been thinking it was the other one--the book-writer," said the
father. Then, without warning: "He's a damned crook."

The daughter went on smoothing the wrinkles out of the fingers of her
gloves. "What makes you think so?" she inquired, with indifference, real
or skilfully assumed.

"He's got too much money to be straight. I've been keeping cases on
him."

"Never mind Mr. Griswold," she interposed. "He is my friend, and I
suppose that is enough to make you hate him. About this other matter:
ten minutes before three o'clock this afternoon I shall go back to Mr.
Raymer. If he tells me that his troubles are straightening themselves
out, I'll get the papers."

"You'll bring 'em here to me?"

"Some day; after I'm sure that you have broken off the deal with Mr.
Galbraith."

Jasper Grierson let his daughter get as far as the door before he
stopped her with a blunt-pointed arrow of contempt.

"I suppose you've fixed it up to marry that college-sharp dub so that
his mother and sister can rub it into you right?" he sneered.

"You can suppose again," she returned, shortly. "If I should marry him,
it would be out of pure spite to those women."

"If?"

"Yes, 'if.' Because, when he asked me, I told him No. You weren't
counting on that, were you?" And having fired this final shot of
contradiction she departed.

After Miss Grierson had driven home from the bank between ten and eleven
in the morning, an admiring public saw her no more until just before
bank-closing hours in the afternoon. Broffin w