ent special reason--should she have
remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for
the two newspaper references?

Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable
tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the
well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his
mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of
trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities
masculine.

"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as
he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't
at all the person to do things without an object."

XX

THE CONVALESCENT

After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly
contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she
was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for
the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master
of Mereside.

The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond
the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert
currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to
serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.

For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable
first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled
his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced,
heavy-browed man at the end of the cafe table--"crudely strong,
elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage:
the gray-wolf type"--and he found no present reason for changing the
record.

Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the
Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than
a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the
manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be
Margery's latest and least accountable fad.

Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the
banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper
Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant
struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the
one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than
half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after