ficantly.

"You said that before." The voice was growing shriller. "How do you
know?"

"Robbin's easy."

"I must believe it if _you say_ so."

"Why you get mad? Why you stick up for him so hard?" persisted the
Frenchman stubbornly.

"Why wouldn't I stick up for him? He's a friend of mine."

"Fine fren--dat lazy cheap-skate!" There was real venom in the voice.

Van Lennop heard the stamp of Essie Tisdale's small foot upon the
hard-trodden dooryard.

"You needn't think you'll advance your own interests by calling him such
names as that! Let me tell you I wouldn't marry you if you asked me a
million, million times!"

Van Lennop started. So he was asking Essie Tisdale to marry him--this
old Edouard Dubois with the bullet-shaped head and the brutal face that
Van Lennop had found so objectionable upon each occasion that he had
been his vis-a-vis in the dining-room?

"Oh, you wouldn't marry me?"--the guttural voice was ugly now--"I offer
you good home, good clothes, ze chance to travel when you lak and hear
ze good music zat you love and you wouldn't marry me if I ask you
million times? Maybe some time, Mees Teesdale, you be _glad_ to marry me
when I ask you once!"

"Maybe I will," the angry young voice flung back, "but that time hasn't
come _yet_, Mr. Dubois!"

"And God forbid that it ever should," breathed Van Lennop to himself at
the window above. His eyes had grown a little moist at this exhibition
of her loyalty and somehow the genuineness of it made him glow, the more
perhaps that he was never without a lurking suspicion of the
disinterestedness of women's friendship for the reasons which Dr. Harpe,
for instance, knew.

What Van Lennop had learned through his unintentional eavesdropping was
something of a revelation. In his mild conjectures as to Crowheart's
opinion of him it never had occurred to him that it considered him
anything more interesting than an impecunious semi-invalid or possibly a
homeseeker taking his own time to locate. But a hold-up! a loafer! a
lazy cheap-skate! Van Lennop shook with silent laughter. A skinflint too
mean to buy a drink! He had no notion of enlightening Crowheart in
regard to himself because of the illuminating conversation he had
overheard. The situation afforded him too much amusement and since Essie
Tisdale liked him for himself and trusted him in the face of what was
evidently Crowheart's opinion, nothing else mattered. The only result
then was to give him a more m