ance!"

She did not understand him. "A chance for what?"

CHAPTER VII

OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY

Durkin was pacing up and down the small room in his stockinged feet,
looking at her, from time to time, with a detached, but ever studiously
alert glance. Then he came to a stop, and confronted her. The memory
of the night before, in the Promenade, with the sudden glimpse of her
profile against the floating automobile curtain, came back to his mind,
with a stab of pain.

"But what has all this to do with Lady Boxspur?" he suddenly demanded,
wondering how long he should be able to have faith in that inner,
unshaken integrity of hers which had passed through so many trials and
survived so many calamities. But she hurried on, as though unconscious
of both his tone and his attitude.

"That has more to do with the next-of-kin agency. I left it out, of
course, but if you _must_ know it now, and here, I can tell you in a
word or two."

"One naturally wants to know when one's wife ascends into the
aristocracy!"

"And a Mercedes touring car as well! But, oh, Jim, surely you and I
don't need to go back to all that sort of thing, at this stage of the
game," she retorted wearily. She felt wounded, weighed down with a
perverse sense of injury at his treatment, of injustice at his
coldness, even in the face of the incongruous circumstances under which
they had met.

But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though to purge her soul, for
all time, of explanation and excuse.

"That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little office up two dingy stairs
in Chancery Lane. For a few days their work seemed bearable enough,
though it hurt me to see that all their income was being squeezed out
of miserably poor people--always the miserably poor, the submerged
souls with romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which, of course,
always just escaped them. That, I could endure. But when I found that
the agency was branching out, and was actually trying to present me for
inspection as a titled heiress, in sore need of a secret and immediate
marriage, I revolted, at once. Then they calmly proposed that I embark
for America, as some sort of bogus countess--and while they were still
talking and debating over what mild and strictly limited extravagances
they would stand for, and just what expenses they would allow, I
bolted! But their scheming and plotting had given me the hint, for I
knew, if the worst came to the worst, I would no