ad lots!"

His persuasive smile, though confessing to bewilderment, insisted.
"Why, my love, they've got to swear either one thing or the other."

"They've got to keep out of the way--that's _their_ view of it, I
guess," said Julia. "Where _are_ they, please--now that they _may_ be
wanted? If you'd like to hunt them up for me you're very welcome."
With which, for the moment, over the difficult case, they faced each
other helplessly enough. And she added to it now the sharpest ache of
her despair. "He knows about Murray Brush. The others"--and her pretty
white-gloved hands and charming pink shoulders gave them up--"may go
hang!"

"Murray Brush--?" It had opened Mr. Pitman's eyes.

"Yes--yes; I do mind _him_."

"Then what's the matter with his at least rallying--?"

"The matter is that, being ashamed of himself, as he well might, he
left the country as soon as he could and has stayed away. The matter
is that he's in Paris or somewhere, and that if you expect him to come
home for me--!" She had already dropped, however, as at Mr. Pitman's
look.

"Why, you foolish thing, Murray Brush is in New York!" It had quite
brightened him up.

"He has come back--?"

"Why, sure! I saw him--when was it? Tuesday!--on the Jersey boat." Mr.
Pitman rejoiced in his news. "_He's_ your man!"

Julia too had been affected by it; it had brought, in a rich wave, her
hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. "He _was_!"

"Then get hold of him, and--if he's a gentleman--he'll prove for you,
to the hilt, that he wasn't."

It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden
suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the
next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater
strangeness yet. "He isn't a gentleman."

"Ah, lordy, lordy!" Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it
but only into the vague. "Oh, then, if he's a pig--!"

"You see there are only a few gentlemen--not enough to go round--and
that makes them count so!" It had thrust the girl herself, for that
matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose
he had no time to judge--aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since
he mightn't perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving
surface of their question. It fell upon Julia's face, fell with the
sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her
for all it immediately assumed.

"There are indeed very few--and