"Ah?"

"That's the reason I've come. He asked me to--you
see I'm in the firm."

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened.
"You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk
to you instead of Mr. Letterblair? Oh, that will be so
much easier!"

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with
his self-satisfaction. He perceived that she had spoken
of business to Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to
have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.

"I am here to talk about it," he repeated.

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that
rested on the back of the sofa. Her face looked pale
and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her
dress. She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and
even pitiful figure.

"Now we're coming to hard facts," he thought,
conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he
had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries.
How little practice he had had in dealing with
unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar
to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the