-it's Bertha,
Westoby--Bertha or nothing!"

"It's too late to say that now, old fellow."

"It's not too late for me to go home this very night."

"Well, Jones," I broke out, "I can't think you'd do such a caddish thing
as that. Think it over for a minute. You come down here; you sweep that
unfortunate girl off her feet; you make love to her with the fury of a
stage villain; you force her to betray her very evident partiality for
you--and then you have the effrontery to say: 'Good-by. I'm off.'"

"My mother--" he began.

"You simply can not act so dishonorably, Jones."

He sat silent for a little while.

"My mother--" he started in again finally.

"Surely your mother loves you?" I demanded.

"That's the terrible part of it, Westoby, she--"

"Pooh!"

"She stinted herself to get me through col--"

"Then why did you ever come here?"

"That's just the question I'm asking myself now."

"I don't see that you have any right to assume all that about your mother,
anyway. Eleanor Van Coort is a woman of a thousand--unimpeachable social
position--a little fortune of her own--accomplished, handsome, charming,
sought after--why, if you managed to win such a girl as that your mother
would walk on air."

"No, she wouldn't. Bertha--"

"You're a pretty cheap lover," I said. "I don't set up to be a little
tin hero, but I'd go through fire and water for _my_ girl. Good heavens,
love is love, and all the mothers--"

He let out a few more groans.

"Then, see here, Jones," I went on, "you owe some courtesy to our
hostess. If you went away to-night it would be an insult. Whatever you
decide to do later, you've simply got to stay here till Tuesday
morning!"

"Must I?" he said, in the tone of a person who is ordered not to leave
the sinking ship.

"A gentleman has to," I said.

He quavered out a sort of acquiescence, and then asked me for the loan
of a white tie. I should have loved to give him a bowstring instead,
with somebody who knew how to operate it. He was a fluff, that fellow--a
tarnation fluff!

IV

It was a pretty glum evening all round. Most of them thought that Jones
had got the chilly mitt. Eleanor looked pale and undecided, not knowing
what to make of Jones' death's-head face. She was resentful and pitying
in turns, and I saw all the material lying around for a first-class
conflagration. Freddy was a bit down on me, too, saying that a smoother
method would have ironed out Jones, and that I had been