seek my fortune. But I fell ill at your gates."

"And now that you're restored to health, you propose in the same
debonair fashion to--well--to resume the search?"

"Of course," said Paul, all the fighting and aristocratic instincts
returning. "Why not?"

There were no tears in his eyes now, and they looked with luminous
fearlessness at Miss Winwood. He drew a chair to the edge of the
bearskin. "Won't you sit down, Miss Winwood?"

She accepted the seat. He sat down too. Before replying she played with
her fan rather roughly--more or less as a man might have played with
it. "What do you think of doing?"

"Journalism," said Paul. He had indeed thought of it.

"Have you any opening?"

"None," he laughed. "But that's the oyster I'm going to open."

Miss Winwood took a cigarette from a silver box near by. Paul sprang to
light it. She inhaled in silence half a dozen puffs. "I'm going to ask
you an outrageous question," she said, at last. "In the first place,
I'm a severely business woman, and in the next I've got an uncle and a
brother with cross-examining instincts, and, though I loathe them--the
instincts, I mean--I can't get away from them. We're down on the
bedrock of things, you and I. Will you tell me, straight, why you went
away to-day to--to"--she hesitated--"to pawn your watch and chain,
instead of waiting till you got to London?"

Paul threw out his arms in a wide gesture. "Why--your servants--"

She cast the just lighted cigarette into the fire, rose and clapped her
hands on his shoulders, her face aflame. "Forgive me--I knew it--there
are doubting Thomases everywhere--and I'm a woman who deals with facts,
so that I can use them to the confusion of enemies. Now I have them.
Ser Federigo's watch and chain. Nicht wahr?"

Remember, you who judge this sensible woman of forty-three, that she
had fallen in love with Paul in the most unreprehensible way in the
world; and if a woman of that age cannot fall in love with a boy
sweetly motherwise, what is the good of her? She longed to prove that
her polyhedral crystal of a paragon radiated pure light from every one
of his innumerable facets. It was a matter of intense joy to turn him
round and find each facet pure. There was also much pity in her heart,
such as a woman might feel for a wounded bird which she had picked up
and nursed in her bosom and healed. Ursula was loath to let her bird
fly forth into the bleak winter.

"My brother and I have been talking a