nk to face her.

"Are you going?" he demanded.

A perfectly justifiable response to this unauthorized query would have
been that it was no concern of his. But there was that in Martin Dyke's
face which hurt the girl to see.

"Yes," she replied.

"With him?"

"Ye--es."

"He isn't your husband."

"No."

"You haven't any husband."

She hung her head guiltily.

"Why did you invent one?"

Instead of replying verbally she raised her arm and pointed across the
roadway to a patch of worn green in the park. He followed the indication
with his eyes. A Keep-Off-the-Grass sign grinned spitefully in his face.

"I see. The invention was for my special benefit."

"Safety first," she murmured.

"I never really believed it--except when you took me by surprise," he
pursued. "That's why I--I went ahead."

"You certainly went ahead," she confirmed. "What are speed laws to you!"

"You're telling me that I haven't played the game according to the
rules. I know I haven't. One has to make his own rules when Fate is in
the game against him." He seemed to be reviewing something in his mind.
"Fate," he observed sententiously, "is a cheap thimble-rigger."

"Fate," she said, "is the ghost around the corner."

"A dark green, sixty-horse-power ghost, operated by a matinee hero, a
movie close-up, a tailor's model--"

"If you mean Reg, it's just as well for you he isn't here."

"Pooh!" retorted the vengeful and embittered Dyke. "I could wreck his
loveliness with one flop of my paint-brush."

"Doubtless," she agreed with a side glance at the wall, now bleeding
from every pore. "It's a fearful weapon. Spare my poor Reg."

"I suppose," said Dyke, desperate now, but not quite bankrupt of hope,
"you'd like me to believe that he's your long-lost brother."

She lowered her eyes, possibly to hide the mischief in them. "No," she
returned hesitantly and consciously. "He isn't--exactly my brother."

He recalled the initials, "R.B.W.," on the car's door. Hope sank for the
third time without a bubble. "Good-bye," said Martin Dyke.

"Surely you're not going to quit your job unfinished," she protested.

Dyke said something forcible and dismissive about the job.

"What will the Mordaunt Estate think?"

Dyke said something violent and destructive about the Mordaunt Estate.

"Perhaps you'd like to take the house, now that it's vacant."

Dyke, having expressed a preference for the tomb as a place of
residence, went on his gloomful wa