same tricks with him that the real thing does."

"I can't believe that."

"No. You wouldn't."

She leaned back and watched him. How much of a boy he was himself,
anyhow! And yet how little he understood the complicated problems of a
boy like Graham, irresponsible but responsive, rich without labor, with
time for the sort of dalliance Clay himself at the same age had had
neither leisure nor inclination to indulge.

He was wandering about the room, his hands in his pockets, his head
bent. When he stopped:

"What am I to do with the girl, Audrey?"

"Get rid of her. That's easy."

"Not so easy as it sounds."

He told her of Dunbar and the photographs, of Rudolph Klein, and the
problem as he saw it.

"So there I am," he finished. "If I let her go, I lose one of the links
in Dunbar's chain. If I keep her?"

"Can't Natalie talk to him? Sometimes a woman can get to the bottom of
these things when a man can't. He might tell her all about it."

"Possibly. But I think it unlikely Natalie would tell me."

She leaned over and patted his hand impulsively.

"What devils we women are!" she said. "Now and then one of us gets what
she deserves. That's me. And now and then one of us get's something she
doesn't deserve. And that's Natalie. She's over-indulgent to Graham."

"He is all she has."

"She has you."

Something in her voice made him turn and look at her.

"That ought to be something, you know," she added. And laughed a little.

"Does Natalie pay his debts?"

"I rather think so."

But that was a subject he could not go on with.

"The fault is mine. I know my business better than I know how to handle
my life, or my family. I don't know why I trouble you with it all,
anyhow. You have enough." He hesitated. "That's not exactly true,
either. I do know. I'm relying on your woman's wit to help me. I'm wrong
somehow."

"About Graham?"

"I have a curious feeling that I am losing him. I can't ask for his
confidence. I can't, apparently, even deserve it. I see him, day after
day, with all the good stuff there is in him, working as little as he
can, drinking more than he should, out half the night, running into
debt--good heavens, Audrey, what can I do?"

She hesitated.

"Of course, you know one thing that would save him, Clay?"

"What?"

"Our getting into the war."

"I ought not to have to lose my boy in order to find him. But--we are
going to be in it."

He had risen and was standing, an elbow on the