rself didn't know, and had
given up trying to find out.

They had planned to go for a spin in Mortimer's motor after dinner, but
in view of the Quarrier fiasco neither was in the mood for anything.

Mortimer, as usual, ate and drank heavily. He was a carnivorous man, and
liked plenty of thick, fat, underdone meat. As for Lydia, her appetite
was as erratic as her own impulses. Her table, always wastefully
elaborate, no doubt furnished subsistence for all the relatives of her
household below stairs, and left sufficient for any ambitious butler to
make a decent profit on.

"Do you know, Leroy," she observed, as they left the table and sauntered
back into the pale blue drawing-room, "do you know that the servants
haven't been paid for three months?"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," he expostulated, "don't begin that sort of
thing! I get enough of that at home; I get it every time I show my
nose!"

"I only mentioned it," she said carelessly.

"I heard you all right. It isn't any pleasanter for me than for you. In
fact, I'm sick of it; I'm dead tired of being up against it every day
of my life. When a man has anything somebody gets it before he can
sidestep. When a man's dead broke there's nobody in sight to touch."

"You had an opportunity to make Howard pay you back."

"Didn't I tell you I missed him?"

"Yes. What are you going to do?"

"Do?"

"Of course. You are going to do something, I suppose."

They had reached the gold and green room above. Lydia began pacing the
length of a beautiful Kermanshah rug--a pale, delicate marvel of rose
and green on a ground of ivory--lovely, but doomed to fade sooner than
the pretty woman who trod it with restless, silk-shod feet.

Mortimer had not responded to her last question. She said presently:
"You have never told me how you intend to make him pay you back."

"What?" inquired Mortimer, turning very red.

"I said that you haven't yet told me how you intend to make Howard
return the money you lost through his juggling with your stock."

"I don't exactly know myself," admitted Mortimer, still overflushed.
"I mean to put it to him squarely, as a debt of honour that he owes. I
asked him whether to invest. Damn him! he never warned me not to. He is
morally responsible. Any man who would sit there and nod monotonously
like a mandarin, knowing all the while what he was doing to wreck the
company, and let a friend put into a rotten concern all the cash he
could scrape together, i