of cold lunch--could have seen her, the song
would have frozen on his lips. Which, one might mention, as showing that
there is always a bright side, would have been much appreciated by the
travelling gentleman in the adjoining room, who had had a wild night
with some other travelling gentlemen, and was then nursing a rather
severe headache, separated from Sam's penetrating baritone only by the
thickness of a wooden wall.

Billie knew all. And, terrible though the fact is as an indictment of
the male sex, when a woman knows all, there is invariably trouble ahead
for some man. There was trouble ahead for Samuel Marlowe. Billie, now in
possession of the facts, had examined them and come to the conclusion
that Sam had played a practical joke on her, and she was a girl who
strongly disapproved of practical humour at her expense.

"That morning I met you at Sir Mallaby's office, Mr. Peters," she said
in a frosty voice, "Mr. Marlowe had just finished telling me a long and
convincing story to the effect that you were madly in love with a Miss
Milliken, who had jilted you, and that this had driven you off your
head, and that you spent your time going about with a pistol, trying to
shoot every red-haired woman you saw, because you thought they were Miss
Milliken. Naturally, when you came in and called me Miss Milliken, and
brandished a revolver, I was very frightened. I thought it would be
useless to tell you that I wasn't Miss Milliken, so I tried to persuade
you that I was and hadn't jilted you after all."

"Good gracious!" said Mr. Peters, vastly relieved; and yet--for always
there is bitter mixed with the sweet--a shade disappointed.
"Then--er--you don't love me after all?"

"No!" said Billie. "I am engaged to Bream Mortimer, and I love him and
nobody else in the world!"

The last portion of her observation was intended for the consumption of
Mr. Bennett, rather than that of Mr. Peters, and he consumed it
joyfully. He folded Billie in his ample embrace.

"I always thought you had a grain of sense hidden away somewhere," he
said, paying her a striking tribute. "I hope now that we've heard the
last of all this foolishness about that young hound Marlowe."

"You certainly have! I don't want ever to see him again! I hate him!"

"You couldn't do better, my dear," said Mr. Bennett, approvingly. "And
now run away. Mr. Peters and I have some business to discuss."

A quarter of an hour later, Webster, the valet, sunning himsel