d Samaritan might have counted," suggested Nan,
smiling. "Unless you can recall any particularly good action which
you've performed in the interval."

"I don't think I've been guilty of a solitary one," he replied
seriously. "May I?" He offered his arm as the guests began trooping
in to dinner--Penelope appropriately paired off with Fenton, whom she
had come to know fairly well in the course of her professional work.
Although, as she was wont to remark, "Ralph Fenton's a big fish and I'm
only a little one." They were chattering happily together of songs and
singers.

"So France has a partial claim, on you, too?" remarked Mallory,
unfolding his napkin.

"Yes--a great-grandmother. I let her take the burden of all my sins."

"Not a very heavy one, I imagine," he returned, smiling.

"I don't know. Sometimes"--Nan's eyes grew suddenly
pensive--"sometimes I feel that one day I shall do something which will
make the burden too heavy to be shunted on to great-grandmamma! Then
I'll have to bear it myself, I suppose."

"There'll be a pal or two around, to give you a hand with it, I
expect," answered Mallory.

"I don't know if there will even be that," she answered dreamily. "Do
you know, I've always had the idea that sometime or other I shall get
myself into an awful hole and that there won't be a single soul in the
world to get me out of it."

She spoke with an odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so
pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated itself to Mallory.

"Don't talk like that. If you think it, you'll be carried forward to
just such disaster on the current of the thought. Be sure--quite,
quite sure--that there will be someone at hand, even if it's only
me"--quaintly.

"The Good Samaritan again? But you mightn't know I was in a
difficulty," she protested.

"I think I should always know if you were in trouble," he said quietly.

There was a new quality in the familiar lazy drawl--something that was
very strong and steady. Although he had laid no stress on the word
"you," yet Nan was conscious in every nerve of her that there was an
emphatic individual significance in the brief words he had just
uttered. She shied away from it like a frightened colt.

"Still you mightn't come to the rescue, even if I were struggling in
the quicksands," she answered.

"I should come," he said deliberately, "whether you wanted me to come
or not."

Followed a brief pause, charged with a curious