t. He patted
her hands.

"There, there, there!" he said.

I have tried to draw Samuel Marlowe so that he will live on the printed
page. I have endeavoured to delineate his character so that it will be
as an open book. And, if I have succeeded in my task, the reader will by
now have become aware that he was a young man with the gall of an Army
mule. His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied
through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright
she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had
caused Jno. Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low,
bleating noises. And did he care? No! All he cared about was the fact
that he had erased for ever from Billie's mind that undignified picture
of himself as he had appeared on the boat, and substituted another which
showed him brave, resourceful, gallant. All he cared about was the fact
that Billie, so cold ten minutes before, had just allowed him to kiss
her for the forty-second time. If you had asked him, he would have said
that he had acted for the best, and that out of evil cometh good, or
some sickening thing like that. That was the sort of man Samuel Marlowe
was.

His face was very close to Billie's, who had cheered up wonderfully by
this time, and he was whispering his degraded words of endearment into
her ear, when there was a sort of explosion in the doorway.

"Great Godfrey!" exclaimed Mr. Rufus Bennett, gazing on the scene from
this point of vantage and mopping with a large handkerchief a scarlet
face, which, as the result of climbing three flights of stairs, had
become slightly soluble. "Great Heavens above! Number four!"

CHAPTER XIV

STRONG REMARKS BY A FATHER

Mr. Bennett advanced shakily into the room, and supported himself with
one hand on the desk, while with the other he still plied the
handkerchief on his over-heated face. Much had occurred to disturb him
this morning. On top of a broken night he had had an affecting
reconciliation scene with Mr. Mortimer, at the conclusion of which he
had decided to take the first train to London in the hope of
intercepting Billie before she reached Sir Mallaby's office on her
mission of war. The local train-service kept such indecently early hours
that he had been compelled to bolt his breakfast, and, in the absence of
Billie, the only member of the household who knew how to drive the car,
to walk to the station, a distance of nearly two