fending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself."

The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a
pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs
he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian,
said, "Who was your fair friend?"

If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it
with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. "This
afternoon?" Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, "That was she." Then he
went on, wrathfully: "She's a girl who has to make her living, and she's
doing it in a new way that she's invented for herself. She has supposed
that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may
be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a
money consideration. She's not a guest in the house, and she won't take
herself on a society basis at all. I don't know what her history is, and
I don't care. She's a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I
should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of
the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It's all
inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much
of the case, and if you're knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick,
I want you to get it straight. That's why I'm talking of it, and not
because I think you've any right to know anything about it."

"Thank you," Bushwick returned, unruffled. "It's about what Miss Macroyd
told me. That's the reason I don't want the ghost-dance to fail."

Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: "She's
so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn't have wished, in Mrs.
Westangle's interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is
going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it,
that's her affair."

"She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would;
and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after
Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle
had to account for the young lady's presence there in your company.
Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the
matter hasn't gone any further."

"Oh, it's quite indifferent to me," Verrian retorted. "I'm nothing but a
dispassionate witness of the situation."

"Of course," Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie
really so amiable t