o!" said Freddie.

Nelly fixed her large eyes on his face. A fleeting impression passed
through Freddie's mind that she was looking unusually pretty this
morning: nor was the impression unjustified. Nelly was wearing for the
first time a Spring suit which was the outcome of hours of painful
selection among the wares of a dozen different stores, and the
knowledge that the suit was just right seemed to glow from her like an
inner light. She felt happy, and her happiness had lent an unwonted
colour to her face and a soft brightness to her eyes.

"How nice it is, your being here!"

Freddie waited for the inevitable question, the question with which
Jill had opened their conversation; but it did not come. He was
surprised, but relieved. He hated long explanations, and he was very
doubtful whether loyalty to Jill could allow him to give them to
Nelly. His reason for being where he was had to do so intimately with
Jill's most private affairs. A wave of gratitude to Nelly swept
through him when he realized that she was either incurious or else too
delicate-minded to show inquisitiveness.

As a matter of fact, it was delicacy that kept Nelly silent. Seeing
Freddie here at the theatre, she had, as is not uncommon with fallible
mortals, put two and two together and made the answer four when it
was not four at all. She had been deceived by circumstantial evidence.
Jill, whom she had left in England wealthy and secure, she had met
again in New York penniless as the result of some Stock Exchange
cataclysm in which, she remembered with the vagueness with which one
recalls once-heard pieces of information, Freddie Rooke had been
involved. True, she seemed to recollect hearing that Freddie's losses
had been comparatively slight, but his presence in the chorus of "The
Rose of America" seemed to her proof that after all they must have
been devastating. She could think of no other reason except loss of
money which could have placed Freddie in the position in which she now
found him, so she accepted it; and, with the delicacy which was innate
in her and which a hard life had never blunted, decided, directly she
saw him, to make no allusion to the disaster.

Such was Nelly's view of the matter, and sympathy gave to her manner a
kind of maternal gentleness which acted on Freddie, raw from his late
encounter with Mr. Johnson Miller and disturbed by Jill's attitude in
the matter of poor old Derek, like a healing balm. His emotions were
to