by any one who--whose opinion he values."

She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo
the words which another man's mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney
did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on
Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.

"But we can't help being interested!" she declared.

"It's very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his
competition is after all of very little account compared with other
things--his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking
horribly used up."

The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the
room at Darrow's side.

"Oh, do you think so?" she said. "I should have thought it was his friend
who was used up."

Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied
to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour,
to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of
expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only
the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with
compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed
care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His
rooms, according to Dick's report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck
to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial
plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs,