rned on the two partners a look of perfectly genuine distress.

"If you'll let me go away and add it up ..." she began.

Goldsmith's heart was touched. The costumes were a bargain at four
hundred and sixty-five, and he knew it. There was an indescribable sort
of dash to them that would lend tone to the whole production. And then
the face of that pretty young girl who must have worked so desperately
hard to make them and who was so obviously helpless at this bargaining
game, would have moved a harder heart than his.

"Oh, all right!" he said. "We'll give in. Four hundred"--he began making
out the check, but his hand hung over it a moment--"and fifty. How's
that?"

Rose drew in a long breath. "That's all right," she said.

It was just as she turned away with the check made out to Doris Dane in
her wrist-bag, that the mystery of that phantom hundred dollars solved
itself. It was the hundred dollars she'd borrowed from Rodney and could
now return to him!

Galbraith took the first chance he could make to shoot her a low-voiced
question. "How much did you get?" he asked, and his face showed
downright surprise when she told him. "That's a pretty fair price," he
commented. "I was afraid they'd screw you way down on it, and I wanted
to help you out, but ..."

"Oh, you did," said Rose. "Telling me they were good. Of course you
couldn't have done anything more. The first thing I want to do," she
went on, "is to pay you back. But I don't know just how to do it. I
can't go to the bank where they know me and--anyway, the name on the
check isn't right."

He told her how easily that could be fixed. He'd take her to the bank he
used here in town and identify her. Then she could pay him and deposit
the balance to her own account. It was a bank where they didn't mind
small accounts. That would be much better than carrying her money around
with her where it could too easily be stolen.

He was very kind about it all and they put the program through that day.
Yet she was vaguely conscious of a sense that he seemed a little
chilled, as if something about the transaction unaccountably depressed
him.

And indeed it was true that he'd have found his tendency to fall in love
with her a good deal harder to resist if she'd shown herself more
helpless in the hands of Goldsmith and Block. She'd actually driven a
good bargain--an unaccountably good bargain! He wished he'd been on hand
to see how she did it. Well, women were queer, there wa