soft. Mrs. Meldrum's further
information contributed moreover to these indulgences--her account of
the girl's neglected childhood and queer continental relegations, with
straying, squabbling, Monte-Carlo-haunting parents; the more invidious
picture, above all, of her pecuniary arrangement, still in force,
with the Hammond Synges, who really, though they never took her
out--practically she went out alone--had their hands half the time in
her pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the
wine-bills and the horses' fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge's fare
in the "Underground" when he went to the City for her. She had been left
with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't even been put in
trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She could spend
her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive, extravagant and
with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn't last very long.

"Couldn't _you_ perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?"
I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception, the
sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously fleece
her."

"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded. "Of
course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night.
But I can't help her at all; she'll take nothing from me. You know what
she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me, she
feels that I've one about her. And then she dislikes me for another
reason that I'm not quite clear about, but that I'm well aware of and
that I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes it
would be impossible moreover here: she wants naturally enough a much
wider field. She must live in London--her game is there. So she takes
the line of adoring me, of saying she can never forget that I was
devoted to her mother--which I wouldn't for the world have been--and of
giving me a wide berth. I think she positively dislikes to look at me.
It's all right; there's no obligation; though people in general can't
take their eyes off me."

"I see that at this moment," I replied. "But what does it matter where
or how, for the present, she lives? She'll marry infallibly, marry
early, and everything then will change."

"Whom will she marry?" my companion gloomily asked.

"Any one she likes. She's so abnormally pretty she can do anything.
She'll fascinate some nabob or some prince."

"She'll fa