n't go?
Did she tell you so?"

"Not what you might call exactly, but she won't all right," George
returned with confidence. "There ain't one chance in a hundred I'm in
wrong."

"In wrong? How?"

"About her bein' who she is."

P. Sybarite subjected the open, naif countenance of the shipping clerk
to a prolonged and doubting scrutiny.

"No, I ain't crazy in the head, neither," George asseverated with some
heat. "I suspicioned somethin' was queer about that girl right along,
but now I _know_ it."

"Explain yourself."

"Ah, it ain't nothin' against her! You don't have to scorch your
collar. _She's_ all right. Only--she 's in bad. I don't s'pose you
seen the evenin' paper?"

"No."

"Well, I picked up the _Joinal_ down to Clancey's--this is it." With
an effective flourish, George drew the sheet from his coat pocket and
unfolded its still damp and pungent pages. "And soon's I seen that,"
he added, indicating a smudged halftone, "I begun to wise up to that
little girl. It's sure some shame about her, all right, all right."

Taking the paper, P. Sybarite examined with perplexity a portrait
labelled "Marian Blessington." Whatever its original aspect, the
coarse mesh of the reproducing process had blurred it to a vague
presentment of the head and shoulders of almost any young woman with
fair hair and regular features: only a certain, almost indefinable
individuality in the pose of the head remotely suggested Molly
Lessing.

In a further endeavour to fathom his meaning, the little bookkeeper
conned carefully the legend attached to the putative likeness:

MARIAN BLESSINGTON

only daughter of the late Nathaniel Blessington, millionaire
founder of the great Blessington chain of department stores.
Although much sought after on account of the immense property into
control of which she is to come on her twenty-fifth birthday, Miss
Blessington contrived to escape matrimonial entanglement until last
January, when Brian Shaynon, her guardian and executor of the
Blessington estate, gave out the announcement of her engagement to
his son, Bayard Shaynon. This engagement was whispered to be
distasteful to the young woman, who is noted for her independent
and spirited nature; and it is now persistently being rumoured that
she had demonstrated her disapproval by disappearing mysteriously
from the knowledge of her guardian. It is said that nothing has
been known of her whereabouts since about the 1st