"Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and
food too hard to digest comfortably?" Gregory Jessup had curled up
unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert
cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity.

"I was thinking about--Billy Burgeman."

He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed
engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and
he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: "I can't talk Billy
with the others; I'm too much cut up over the whole thing to stand
hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy's character and motives." He
stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy's face. "I believe a chap could
turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you'd keep the
contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault."

Patsy smiled appreciatively. "Faith! you make me feel like Saint
Martin's chest that Satan himself couldn't be opening."

"What did he have in it?"

"Some good Christian souls."

"Contents don't tally--mine are some very un-Christian thoughts." He
abandoned the sandwich and cheese, and settled himself to the more
serious business of balancing his remarks. "Billy and I work for the
same engineering firm; he walked out for lunch Tuesday and no one has
seen him since--unless it's Marjorie Schuyler. Couldn't get anything
out of the old man when I first went to see him, and now he's too ill
to see any one. Marjorie said she really didn't know where he was,
and quit town the next day. Now maybe they don't either of them know
what's happened any more than I do; but I think it's infernally queer
for a man to disappear and say nothing to his father, the girl he's
engaged to, or his best friend. Don't you?"

Patsy's past training stood stanchly by her. She played the part of
the politely interested listener--nothing more--and merely nodded her
head.

"You see," the man went on, "Billy has a confoundedly queer sense of
honor; he can stretch it at times to cover nearly everybody's
calamities and the fool shortcomings of all his acquaintances. Why,
it wasn't a month ago a crowd of us from the works were lunching
together, and the talk came around to speculating. Billy's hard
against it on principle, but he happened to say that if he was going
in for it at all he'd take cotton. What was in Billy's mind was not
the money in it, but the chance to give the South a boost. Well, one
of the fellows took it as a straight tip