d with little catches in her beautiful, slurring,
Blue-grass voice.

"Maybe they didn't; but they wouldn't go back now, not one," he answered
her.

She was silenced, and stood quiet beside him as he opened the door of
the big, gloomy, protective building, with the key the woman of another
world than his had intrusted to him.

"I know," she said at last, as she held out her hand to him. And because
it trembled ever so slightly and was cold, he put his warm lips to it
for a second before he handed her into a great international safety. He
remembered the key, but he didn't give it to her. Somehow he wanted it
himself. He liked the feel of it in his pocket.

"Wish I had Denny locked up in the Christian association!" he growled to
himself as Valentine whirled him home.

Just at that exact moment Mr. Dennis Farraday sat in Miss Violet
Hawtry's Louis Quinze parlor at the Claridge, engaged in tenderly and
awkwardly patting that star's sobbing white shoulder, as she lay on
just such a couch as Manon Lescaut probably had had for just such
scenes.

"I don't blame him at all," sobbed Miss Hawtry, provocatively, with the
art of long practice both on the stage and off. "My kind always loses to
hers when the time comes."

"Don't!" pleaded Mr. Farraday. It was all he could or was willing to
plead at that moment.

"But I want to make good in this play for him and her--and you--before I
go out of his life forever. I want to repay him with--with both money
and happiness. He made me an artist." With these words Miss Hawtry made
an acknowledgment of the truth that she herself really believed to be
untrue, because she saw that to praise Mr. Vandeford was the best way to
blind Mr. Farraday while she approached him in that blindness. She knew
that his loyalty to his David would be a barrier unless she used it as a
ladder.

"My God! How--how great women are!" was the immediate and hoped-for
response she drew from the big Jonathan.

"My art must fill my life now. Only there will be--friendship. You make
me see that by the comfort of your kindness." Miss Hawtry laid her
flushed cheek in the hollow of good Dennis's big warm hand. The moment
was tense, but Hawtry had timed her line a little too far ahead, and it
failed to get across. The prey was as embarrassed as a girl and, with
another brotherly pat, arose to go.

"You'll always let me do anything I can, won't you?" he asked as he
looked down upon her for a second, then took a con