louis. While, before bursting into a laugh, he stared at her with
surprise, she declared that she was awfully pressed for the money; she
was desperate for it--it would save her life.

"Dear lady, c'est trop fort!" Pemberton laughed in the manner and with
the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial, the best
anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves. "Where in the world do you
suppose I should get three louis, du train dont vous allez?"

"I thought you worked--wrote things. Don't they pay you?"

"Not a penny."

"Are you such a fool as to work for nothing?"

"You ought surely to know that."

Mrs. Moreen stared, then she coloured a little. Pemberton saw she had
quite forgotten the terms--if "terms" they could be called--that he had
ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her memory as little
as her conscience. "Oh yes, I see what you mean--you've been very nice
about that; but why drag it in so often?" She had been perfectly urbane
with him ever since the rough scene of explanation in his room the
morning he made her accept _his_ "terms"--the necessity of his making his
case known to Morgan. She had felt no resentment after seeing there was
no danger Morgan would take the matter up with her. Indeed, attributing
this immunity to the good taste of his influence with the boy, she had
once said to Pemberton "My dear fellow, it's an immense comfort you're a
gentleman." She repeated this in substance now. "Of course you're a
gentleman--that's a bother the less!" Pemberton reminded her that he had