ft behind some letters with instructions
that during his absence from business Mr. Jarvis and I should
jointly take charge. I can't really imagine why I should have been
put in such a position, but there it is. The solicitors have been
down this afternoon, and I am drawing six pounds a week and a
bonus."

She took his hand in hers and patted it gently.

"I am so very glad, Arnold," she said, "so very glad that the days
of your loneliness are over. Now you will be able to go and take
some comfortable rooms somewhere and make the sort of friends you
ought to have. Didn't I always foretell it?" she went on. "I used to
try and fancy sometimes that the ships we saw were bringing treasure
for me, too, but I never really believed that. It wasn't quite
likely."

He turned and looked at her. The first flush of excitement had left
her cheeks. She was very pale, and her soft gray eyes shone like
stars. Her mouth was tremulous. It was the passing of a single
impulse of self-pity.

"Foolish little girl!" he exclaimed, under his breath. "You don't
really suppose that the treasure which came for me wasn't yours,
too? But there, we'll talk about our plans later on. At present,
what you have to do is to eat and to drink that glass of Burgundy
and to listen to me. I want to talk about myself."

It was the subtlest way to distract her thoughts. She listened to
him with keen interest while he talked of his day's work. It was not
until she mentioned Fenella's name that his face clouded over.

"Curiously enough, Mrs. Weatherley is displeased with me. I should
have thought it entirely through her influence and suggestions that
Mr. Weatherley had been so kind to me, but to-day I asked her some
questions which I felt that I had a right to ask, and have been told
to mind my own business. She left me at the office without even
saying 'Good afternoon.'"

"What sort of questions?"

"I don't know that I can tell you exactly what the questions were,"
Arnold continued, "because they concerned some matters in which Mrs.
Weatherley and her brother were chiefly concerned. To tell you the
truth, ever since that night when I went to Hampstead to dine, the
oddest things seem to have happened to me. I have to pinch myself
sometimes to realize that this is London and that I am a clerk in
the office of a wholesale provision merchant. When I let myself go,
I seem to have been living in an unreal world, full of strange
excitements--a veritable Arabia