m and lay down. I hopes ye git's took keer of yourself,
but ef ye don't ye're right welcome ter bunk in with me."

"I'll go with you now," declared the timber buyer.

CHAPTER VI

In a squalid room above stairs, Halloway sat, coatless, with his
flannel shirt open on a throat that rose from the swell of his chest as
a tower rises from a hill. His hair was rumpled; his whole aspect
disheveled; but when he grinned there was the flash of strong teeth as
white as a hound's and as even as a professional beauty's.

"Now tell me," he demanded with prompt interest, "who is this barbaric
and regal creature in whose train I find you? Do you assert any claim
of copyright--or prior discovery, or is it a clear field and no favor?"

When Brent answered, it was with challenging decisiveness. "A clear
field, yes--but certainly no favor for either of us. She is primitive
enough to hold fast to a wholesome code. I wouldn't advise any
philandering."

Halloway bent his head backward and gazed meditatively at the cloud of
smoke which he sent ceiling-ward.

"So the faithful and chivalrous friend is giving me the benefit of his
experience touching the stern virtue of an almost Druid life," he
commented. "Yet I know these people as few outsiders do."

"Nevertheless, you _are_ an outsider, Jack. When we last sat
quarreling in your rooms, your windows gave off over the rhododendron
of Central Park--and the bronze horseman in the Plaza. Here the
rhododendron has other uses than the decorative. She could be only a
reckless adventure in your life--and in all likelihood, a fatal one."

With quiet amusement in the eyes that still gazed upward, Halloway
received this gratuitous counsel.

"I begin to think that, as an adventure, she'd be worth fatality," he
said.

With the license of old acquaintance, Brent went on with his berating.

"I happen to know you in real life as well as in masquerade. Whether
your whim calls for this fantastic and shaggy disguise or for the
impeccability of evening dress, you are still only a handsome beast of
prey. You are so incorrigible and so devoid of conventional morality
that, in being fond of you, I wonder at myself."

"Conventional morality be damned! I repudiate it utterly," declared
the giant calmly. "But tell me about this girl."

"I never saw her until a few days back," Brent enlightened his
inquisitor. "Her beauty and her dauntlessness have laid a sort of
spell on me and I'm a