Very soon Helen had learned how his
connection with Ingram had begun and developed, by what strange chance
the letter he had written to him had spun the first thread of the web
in which he was now floundering, and how he had sought to lose himself
in the apparent dreamland before him. Helen's eyes were fixed on him
as her quick brain seized on every point. The narration came to her as
a complete revelation.

"And if I hadn't insisted on your dining that evening," she cried,
"you would never have got into this purgatory of a dreamland."

"I think I should have got there all the same," he answered, smiling,
conscious of how much good it was doing him to talk to his dear friend
again. "I must have met Ingram sooner or later and then the same thing
would have happened."

"Ingram is a blackguard!" said Helen severely. "With all his
thick-headed cleverness, he had yet insight enough to know that you
would be taken with that creature. Probably he knew already how your
letter had impressed her and that she was curious about you. And so he
reckoned to play on your temperament, hoping that might prove an easy
method of ending his connection with her. Why, he must have jumped at
the idea of taking you to her."

Morgan was rather apologetic on Ingram's behalf, pleading that he must
have yielded to the sudden temptation and was not really such a
Machiavellian fellow.

"There have been times when, I feel sure, he spoke to me from his
heart. But I do not feel revengeful against him, so let him be dead
and buried, so far as we are concerned."

"With all my heart," said Helen. "But I confess," she went on
laughingly, "it annoys me to think you saw more of the game than I
that evening. That is a fact that wounds my vanity. And now about this
theatre business. You must be in a terrible plight. Was there ever
such a man as you, Morgan, for getting into scrapes?"

"When a man is born into the wrong world--" he began.

"He must be a very interesting sort of person to know," concluded
Helen.

When Morgan went on to relate the history of the enterprise he
seemed to get a saner adjustment of his mental focus. In the telling
he had sight of the whole business as a lamentable, real piece of his
personal life, even perceiving as he described the stormy incidents of
that morning--more dramatic than anything in "The Basha's
Favourite"--that it had not been without its humorous elements. He
understood quite well, of course, that unless C