"Well, you see, Miss Valentine, the Honorable Frederick Threepwood is about to be married; and he thought that possibly, on the whole, it would be better that the letters--and poetry--which he wrote you were nonexistent."

Not all R. Jones' gentlemanliness--and during this speech he diffused it like a powerful scent in waves about him--could hide the unpleasant meaning of the words.

"He was afraid I might try to blackmail him?" said Joan, with formidable calm.

R. Jones raised and waved a fat hand deprecatingly.

"My dear Miss Valentine!"

Joan rose and R. Jones followed her example. The interview was plainly at an end.

"Please tell Mr. Threepwood to make his mind quite easy. He is in no danger."

"Exactly--exactly; precisely! I assured Threepwood that my visit here would be a mere formality. I was quite sure you had no intention whatever of worrying him. I may tell him definitely, then, that you have destroyed the letters?"

"Yes. Good-evening."

"Good-evening, Miss Valentine."

The closing of the door behind him left him in total darkness, but he hardly liked to return and ask Joan to reopen it in order to light him on his way. He was glad to be out of her presence. He was used to being looked at in an unfriendly way by his fellows, but there had been something in Joan's eyes that had curiously discomfited him.

R. Jones groped his way down, relieved that all was over and had ended well. He believed what she had told him, and he could conscientiously assure Freddie that the prospect of his sharing the fate of poor old Percy was nonexistent. It is true that he proposed to add in his report that the destruction of the letters had been purchased with difficulty, at a cost of just five hundred pounds; but that was a mere business formality.

He had almost reached the last step when there was a ring at the front door. With what he was afterward wont to call an inspiration, he retreated with unusual nimbleness until he had almost reached Joan's door again. Then he leaned over the banister and listened.

The disheveled maid opened the door. A girl's voice spoke:

"Is Miss Valentine in?"

"She's in; but she's engaged."

"I wish you would go up and tell her that I want to see her. Say it's Miss Peters--Miss Aline Peters."

The banister shook beneath R. Jones' sudden clutch. For a moment he felt almost faint. Then he began to think swiftly. A great light had dawned on him, and the thought outstanding in his mind was that never again would he trust a man or woman on the evidence of his senses. He could have sworn that this Valentine girl was on the level. He had been perfectly satisfied with her statement that she had destroyed the letters. And all the while she had been playing as deep a game as he had come across in the whole course of his professional career! He almost admired her. How she had taken him in!

It was obvious now what her game was. Previous to his visit she had arranged a meeting with Freddie's fiancee, with the view of opening negotiations for the sale of the letters. She had held him, Jones, at arm's length because she was going to sell the letters to whoever would pay the best price. But for the accident of his happening to be here when Miss Peters arrived, Freddie and his fiancee would have been bidding against each other and raising each other's price. He had worked the same game himself a dozen times, and he resented the entry of female competition into what he regarded as essentially a male field of enterprise.

As the maid stumped up the stairs he continued his retreat. He heard Joan's door open, and the stream of light showed him the disheveled maid standing in the doorway.

"Ow, I thought there was a gentleman with you, miss."

"He left a moment ago. Why?"

"There's a lady wants to see you. Miss Peters, her name is."

"Will you ask her to come up?"

The disheveled maid was no polished mistress of ceremonies. She leaned down into the void and hailed Aline.

"She says will you come up?"

Aline's feet became audible on the staircase. There were greetings.

"Whatever brings you here, Aline?"

"Am I interrupting you, Joan, dear?"

"No. Do come in! I was only surprised to see you so late. I didn't know you paid calls at this hour. Is anything wrong? Come in."

The door closed, the maid retired to the depths, and R. Jones stole cautiously down again. He was feeling absolutely bewildered. Apparently his deductions, his second thoughts, had been all wrong, and Joan was, after all, the honest person he had imagined at first sight. Those two girls had talked to each other as though they were old friends; as though they had known each other all their lives. That was the thing which perplexed R. Jones.

With the tread of a red Indian, he approached the door and put his ear to it. He found he could hear quite comfortably.

Aline, meantime, inside the room, had begun to draw comfort from Joan's very appearance, she looked so capable.

Joan's eyes had changed the expression they had contained during the recent interview. They were soft now, with a softness that was half compassionate, half contemptuous. It is the compensation which life gives to those whom it has handled roughly in order that they shall be able to regard with a certain contempt the small troubles of the sheltered. Joan remembered Aline of old, and knew her for a perennial victim of small troubles. Even in their schooldays she had always needed to be looked after and comforted. Her sweet temper had seemed to invite the minor slings and arrows of fortune. Aline was a girl who inspired protectiveness in a certain type of her fellow human beings. It was this quality in her that kept George Emerson awake at nights; and it appealed to Joan now.

Joan, for whom life was a constant struggle to keep the wolf within a reasonable distance from the door, and who counted that day happy on which she saw her way clear to paying her weekly rent and possibly having a trifle over for some coveted hat or pair of shoes, could not help feeling, as she looked at Aline, that her own troubles were as nothing, and that the immediate need of the moment was to pet and comfort her friend. Her knowledge of Aline told her the probable tragedy was that she had lost a brooch or had been spoken to crossly by somebody; but it also told her that such tragedies bulked very large on Aline's horizon.

Trouble, after all, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; and Aline was far less able to endure with fortitude the loss of a brooch than she herself to bear the loss of a position the emoluments of which meant the difference between having just enough to eat and starving.

"You're worried about something," she said. "Sit down and tell me all about it."

Aline sat down and looked about her at the shabby room. By that curious process of the human mind which makes the spectacle of another's misfortune a palliative for one's own, she was feeling oddly comforted already. Her thoughts were not definite and she could not analyze them; but what they amounted to was that, though it was an unpleasant thing to be bullied by a dyspeptic father, the world manifestly held worse tribulations, which her father's other outstanding quality, besides dyspepsia--wealth, to wit--enabled her to avoid.

It was at this point the dim beginnings of philosophy began to invade her mind. The thing resolved itself almost into an equation. If father had not had indigestion he would not have bullied her. But, if father had not made a fortune he would not have had indigestion. Therefore, if father had not made a fortune he would not have bullied her. Practically, in fact, if father did not bully her he would not be rich. And if he were not rich--

She took in the faded carpet, the stained wall paper and the soiled curtains with a comprehensive glance. It certainly cut both ways. She began to be a little ashamed of her misery.

"It's nothing at all; really," she said. "I think I've been making rather a fuss about very little."

Joan was relieved. The struggling life breeds moods of depression, and such a mood had come to her just before Aline's arrival. Life, at that moment, had seemed to stretch before her like a dusty, weary road, without hope. She was sick of fighting. She wanted money and ease, and a surcease from this perpetual race with the weekly bills. The mood had been the outcome partly of R. Jones' gentlemanly-veiled insinuations, but still more, though she did not realize it, of her yesterday's meeting with Aline.

Mr. Peters might be unguarded in his speech when conversing with his daughter--he might play the tyrant toward her in many ways; but he did not stint her in the matter of dress allowance, and, on the occasion when she met Joan, Aline had been wearing so Parisian a hat and a tailor-made suit of such obviously expensive simplicity that green-eyed envy had almost spoiled Joan's pleasure at meeting this friend of her opulent days.

She had suppressed the envy, and it had revenged itself by assaulting her afresh in the form of the worst fit of the blues she had had in two years.

She had been loyally ready to sink her depression in order to alleviate Aline's, but it was a distinct relief to find that the feat would not be necessary.

"Never mind," she said. "Tell me what the very little thing was."

"It was only father," said Aline simply.

Joan cast her mind back to the days of school and placed father as a rather irritable person, vaguely reputed to be something of an ogre in his home circle.

"Was he angry with you about something?" she asked.

"Not exactly angry with me; but--well, I was there."

Joan's depression lifted slightly. She had forgotten, in the stunning anguish of the sudden spectacle of that hat and that tailor-made suit, that Paris hats and hundred-and-twenty-dollar suits not infrequently had what the vulgar term a string attached to them. After all, she was independent. She might have to murder her beauty with hats and frocks that had never been nearer Paris than the Tottenham Court Road; but at least no one bullied her because she happened to be at hand when tempers were short.