answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!"

There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some
hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain. She had been
thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted second,
been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce beneath the
surface.

"I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day," she said with a bitter
laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such an
infinite distance apart.

"Why should one be serious then? There will be no question of an alibi,
or evidence for the defence--no cross-examination. A cut-and-dried
verdict!"

She ignored his words. "Shall you be at home to dinner?" she rejoined
coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot across
the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.

"I fancy not," he answered, his eyes turned away also--towards the
cupboard containing the liqueur. "Better ask Billy; and keep him in,
and talk to him--I really would like you to talk to him. He admires you
so much. I wish--in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with
us," he added half abstractedly. He was trying to see his way through a
sudden confusion of ideas. Confusion was rare to him, and his senses,
feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of