nce which the student of men, Mr.
Jackson Hyane, was banking upon answered indifferently to the name of
Tibbetts or Bones.

At half-past eight that night he saw his cousin off from King's Cross.
He had engaged a sleeper for her, and acted the part of dutiful
relative to the life, supplying her with masses of literature to while
away the sleepless hours of the journey.

"I feel awfully uncomfortable about going away," said the girl, in a
troubled voice. "Mr. Tibbetts would say that he could spare me even if
he were up to his eyes in work. And I have an uncomfortable feeling at
the back of my mind that there was something I should have told
him--and didn't."

"Queer bird, Tibbetts!" said the other curiously. "They call him
Bones, don't they?"

"I never do," said the girl quietly; "only his friends have that
privilege. He is one of the best men I have ever met."

"Sentimental, quixotic, and all that sort of thing, eh?" said Jackson,
and the girl flushed.

"He has never been sentimental with me," she said, but did not deceive
the student of men.

When the train had left the station, he drove straightaway to
Devonshire Street. Bones was in his study, reading, or pretending to
read, and the last person he expected to see that evening was Mr.
Jackson Hyane. But the welcome he gave to that most unwelcome visitor
betrayed neither his distrust nor his frank dislike of the young
well-groomed man in evening-dress who offered him his hand with such a
gesture of good fellowship.

"Sit down, Mr.--er----" said Bones.

There was a cold, cold feeling at his heart, a sense of coming
disaster, but Bones facing the real shocks and terrors of life was a
different young man from the Bones who fussed and fumed over its
trifles.

"I suppose you wonder why I have come to see you, Mr. Tibbetts," said
Hyane, taking a cigarette from the silver box on the table. "I rather
wonder why I have the nerve to see you myself. I've come on a very
delicate matter."

There was a silence.

"Indeed?" said Bones a little huskily, and he knew instinctively what
that delicate matter was.

"It is about Marguerite," said Mr. Hyane.

Bones inclined his head.

"You see, we have been great pals all our lives," went on Jackson
Hyane, pulling steadily at the cigarette--"in fact, sweethearts."

His keen eyes never left the other's face, and he read all he wanted to
know.

"I am tremendously fond of Marguerite," he went on, "and I think I am