d that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite
politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little
tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was
there at all.

He gathered his wits--it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing
that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time
when he hadn't been invited--it forced him into being so casually
polite.

"Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance," he said with a
ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another
that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea
sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of
everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to
triangular murder. "I hope I'm not--disturbing you?"

"Oh no. No," and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling
admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of
the act.

"Only you see," and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy,
"Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you
this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful
nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but
the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand." "A
letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?" Again Oliver
realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was
certainly not obvious. For "I'm so glad you came then," she was saying
with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. "Won't you come in?"

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she
was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver
imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not
at all sure that she couldn't.

"Oh Ted--" he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable
distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, "there's a friend of yours
here with a letter for you--"

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the
front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills,
didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a
little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why,
when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern
St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and
perilous, he should feel quite so