smile. It was too evidently
not for him Kerr had been hunting, and after the first stammer of
embarrassment, the Englishman made no attempt to conceal his real
intentions. His words merely served him as an excuse not to retreat.

"This is a good place to sit," he said, pushing forward a chair for
Flora. She sank into it, wondering weakly what daring or what danger had
brought him into a house where he was not known, to seek her. He sat
down in the compartment of a double settee near her. Harry still stood
with a dubious smile on his face. The look the two men exchanged
appeared to her a prolongment of their earnest interrogation in the
picture gallery; but this time it struck her that both carried it off
less well. Harry, especially, bore it badly.

"Did you say you were looking for me?" he remarked. "Well, Buller's been
looking for _you_. He wants to know about some Englishman that they're
trying to put up at the club."

"How's that? Oh, yes! I remember." Kerr shrugged. "Never heard of him at
home, and can't vouch for every fellow who comes along, just because he
is English."

"Quite so!" said Harry, with a straight look at Kerr that made Flora
uncomfortable.

"But Judge Buller has already vouched for that man," she said quickly,
"so he must be all right."

Kerr inclined his head to her with a smile.

"Buller is easily taken in," said Harry calmly. Under the direct, the
insolent meaning of his look Flora felt her face grow hot--her hands
cold. Harry could sit there taunting this man, hitting him over another
man's back, and Kerr could not resent it. He could only sit--his head a
little canted forward--looking at Harry with the traces of a dry smile
upon his lips.

She thought the next moment everything would be declared. She sprang up,
and, with an impulse for rescue, went to the door of the smoking-room.
"Judge Buller," she called.

There was a sudden cessation of talk; a movement of forms dimly seen in
the thick blue element; and then through wreaths of smoke, the judge's
face dawned upon her like a sun through fog.

"Well, well, Miss Flora," he wanted to know, "to what bad action of
mine do I owe this good fortune?"

She retreated, beckoning him to the middle of the room. "You owe it to
the bad action of another," she said gaily. "Your friends are being
slandered."

Harry made a movement as if he would have stopped her, and the
expression of his face, in its alarm, was comic. But she paid no heed.