dy paid no apparent attention to her frivolousness; only turned
and went noisily out of the drawing-room, offering no return to her
daintily inflected good-afternoon.

For her own part, as she heard the outer door close behind the
detective, Aggie's expression grew vicious, and the heavy brows drew
very low, until the level line almost made her prettiness vanish.

"The truck-horse detective!" she sneered. "An eighteen collar, and a
six-and-a-half hat! He sure had his nerve, trying to bluff us!"

But it was plain that Garson was of another mood. There was anxiety in
his face, as he stood staring vaguely out of the window.

"Perhaps it wasn't a bluff, Aggie," he suggested.

"Well, what have we done, I'd like to know?" the girl demanded,
confidently. She took a cigarette and a match from the tabouret beside
her, and stretched her feet comfortably, if very inelegantly, on a chair
opposite.

Garson answered with a note of weariness that was unlike him.

"It ain't what you have done," he said, quietly. "It's what they can
make a jury think you've done. And, once they set out to get you--God,
how they can frame things! If they ever start out after Mary----" He did
not finish the sentence, but sank down into his chair with a groan that
was almost of despair.

The girl replied with a burst of careless laughter.

"Joe," she said gaily, "you're one grand little forger, all right, all
right. But Mary's got the brains. Pooh, I'll string along with her as
far as she wants to go. She's educated, she is. She ain't like you and
me, Joe. She talks like a lady, and, what's a damned sight harder,
she acts like a lady. I guess I know. Wake me up any old night and ask
me--just ask me, that's all. She's been tryin' to make a lady out of
me!"

The vivaciousness of the girl distracted the man for the moment from
the gloom of his thoughts, and he turned to survey the speaker with a
cynical amusement.

"Swell chance!" he commented, drily.

"Oh, I'm not so worse! Just you watch out." The lively girl sprang
up, discarded the cigarette, adjusted an imaginary train, and spoke
lispingly in a society manner much more moderate and convincing than
that with which she had favored the retiring Cassidy. Voice, pose and
gesture proclaimed at least the excellent mimic.

"How do you do, Mrs. Jones! So good of you to call!... My dear Miss
Smith, this is indeed a pleasure." She seated herself again, quite
primly now, and moved her hands over the