the kind that would rather die herself, and let everybody else die, than
be party to any sort of deception."

"She must be a queer woman," St. John bewailed himself, looking at the
point of his cigar, and discovering to his surprise that it was out. He
did not attempt to light it. "Of course, I can't ask you _who_ she is;
but why shouldn't I see her, and try what _I_ can do with her? I'm the
one that's the principal sufferer in this matter," he added, perhaps
seeing refusal in Hewson's troubled eye.

"Because--for one reason--she's in London."

"Oh Lord!" St. John lamented.

"But if she were here in New York, I couldn't allow it," he continued.
"It was in confidence between us."

"She doesn't seem to have thought so," said St. John, with sarcasm which
Hewson could not resent.

"There's only one thing for me to do," said Hewson, who had been thinking
the point over, and saw no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even
merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the face of the mounting
accumulations of other men he had grown comparatively poor, without
actually losing money, since he had begun to lead the life which had long
been his ideal. After carefully ascertaining at the time in question that
he had sufficient income from inherited means to live without his
profession, he had closed his law-office without shutting many clients
out, and had contributed himself to the formation of a leisure class,
which he conceived was regrettably lacking in our conditions. He had