."

"What?"

"Who wouldn't, when you were talking that way about opportunity and
insisting that I stay here and all that sort of thing?" the young woman
inquired tartly. "It was plain enough that you were a crank, at the best
of it, and I didn't know--well, it seemed better to take a chance of
getting out during the night."

Second by second, normal cerebration was returning to Anthony, and
although it caused him to grow colder and colder with plain apprehension
it also rendered his perspective more true, for he burst out with----

"Why in Heaven's name did you, a girl, ever come here in the first
place?"

"What?" The girl smiled flittingly and ruefully. "Oh, there was a reason
for that, too."

"What was it?"

She of the Titian hair eyed him thoughtfully and shook her head.

"Perhaps I'll tell you some other time," she said.

"Why not now?" Anthony snapped.

"You wouldn't be any happier for knowing, just now," the girl said
mysteriously.

Her pajamaed legs, swathed in the mighty bathrobe, crossed comfortably
Turkish fashion, and she considered Anthony with her calm, quizzical
eyes--and of a sudden an overwhelming helplessness surged through
Anthony Fry and he had more than a little difficulty in concealing the
slight tremble of his limbs.

For if the boy David had been a nervous, frightened creature, the lady
who had succeeded him was almost anything else! David had been timorous
and given to shrinking; the girl was all quiet assurance. David's eyes
had been frightened and round; these eyes were just as round, but, as
much as anything else, they seemed to express mild amusement at
Anthony's discomfiture.

And that was the way of the whole sex, Anthony reflected bitterly.
Having enmeshed mere man and entangled him, hands, feet, and everything
else, it was woman's habit to sit and stare calmly, just as this one was
sitting and staring, wordlessly inquiring just what he meant to do about
it.

"Who are you?" he asked dizzily.

"Um," said the girl meditatively. "Well, if you find it necessary to
call me anything, call me--er--Mary."

"Mary what?"

"Just Mary."

"But your other name----"

"You wouldn't be any happier for knowing that either," the girl assured
him serenely.

"What on earth does that mean?" Anthony demanded, with almost a return
of his old imperious manner.

Mary gazed fixedly at him for a moment, deeply and inscrutably and with
that in her eyes which, although he could not name i