the red light reached to her face.

Rigden came slowly to her side. She took no notice of him. His chair was
as he had pushed it back an age ago; he drew it nearer than before, and
sat down. Nor was this the end of his effrontery.

"Don't touch my hand, please!"

She would not even look at him. In a flash his face was slashed with
lines, so deep you might have looked for them to fill with blood. There
was plenty of blood beneath the skin. But he obeyed her promptly.

"I am sorry you were present just now," he remarked, as though nothing
very tragical had happened. There was none the less an underlying note
of tragedy which Moya entirely misconstrued.

"So am I," said she; and her voice nipped like a black frost.

"I wanted you to go, you know!" he reminded her.

"Do you really think it necessary to tell me that?"

All this time she was back in her now invisible advertisements. And her
tone was becoming more and more worthy of a Bethune.

"I naturally didn't want you to hear me tell a lie," explained Rigden,
with inconsistent honesty.

"On the contrary, I'm very glad to have heard it," rejoined Moya. "It's
instructive, to say the least."

"It was necessary," said Rigden quietly.

"No doubt!"

"A lie sometimes is," he continued calmly. "You will probably agree with
me there."

"Thank you," said Moya promptly; but no insinuation had been intended,
no apology was offered, and Rigden proceeded as though no interruption
had occurred.

"I am not good at them as a general rule," he confessed. "But just now I
was determined to do my best. I suppose you would call it my worst!"

Moya elected not to call it anything.

"That poor fellow in the store----"

"I really don't care to know anything about him."

"--I simply couldn't do it," concluded Rigden expressively.

"Is he the man they want or not?"

The question came in one breath with the interruption, but with a change
of tone so unguardedly complete that Rigden smiled openly. There was no
answering smile from Moya. Her sense of humour, that saving grace of the
Bethunes as a family, had deserted her as utterly as other graces of
which she had more or less of a monopoly.

"Of course he's the man," said Rigden at once; but again there was the
deeper trouble in his tone, the intrinsic trouble which mere results
could not aggravate.

And this time Moya's perceptions were more acute. But by now pride had
the upper hand of her. There was some extraordinary