have
been increased. Graydon, I've a secret to tell you, which, for
an intense, aesthetic, and vaguely devotional woman, is a most
humiliating confession: I'm awfully hungry. When will dinner be
ready?"

"I have a secret to tell you also," he replied, with a half-vexed
flash in his eyes: "There is a girl in this house who explains
herself more or less every day, and who yet remains the most charming
conundrum that ever kept a man awake from perplexity."

"Oh, dear!" cried Madge, "is Miss Wildmere so bad as that? Poor, pale
victim of insomnia! By the way, do you and Mr. Arnault keep a ledger
account of the time you receive? or do you roughly go on the principle
of 'share and share alike'?" and with eyes flashing back laughter at
his reddening face, she ran up the steps and disappeared.

"That was a Parthian arrow," he muttered. "If we go smoothly on the
sharing principle at present, we shall soon go roughly enough, or
cease to go at all."

But the lady in question was putting forth all her resources, which
were not slight when enlisted in her own behalf, to keep the two men
_in statu quo_ until more time, with its chances, should pass.

Arnault smiled grimly when he saw her departing with Graydon. She had
been evasive, but very friendly, during the day thus far, and after
what he had said the preceding night he felt that he was committed to
her moods for a week if he could not bring her to a decision before.
Seeing Mr. Wildmere walking restlessly up and down the piazza, he
joined him, and offering a superb cigar, said, "Suppose we go out to
the lake and see where the little kid was so nearly drowned."

Soon after they were smoking in the shade, the thoughts of both
reverting to kindred anxieties. Arnault decided to make one move
before the final one. Perhaps only this would be required; perhaps
it might prepare the way for more serious action. They talked over
business. Arnault, permitting the other to see through a veiled
distinctness of language that he was prospering, remarked, "By the
way, I have a little transaction which I wish you would carry out for
us," and mentioned an affair of ordinary brokerage, concluding, in
off-hand tones, "from what you said some days since I infer that you
may find a little money handy at present. I can let you have a check
for five hundred or a thousand just as well as not. I know how dull
times are now, and you will soon make it up by commissions."

The hard-pressed man coul