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me, since he was going to be so upset. . . . He is—quite unhappy.” Her heart softened at once. He did not speak again for a little time, and she put out a timid hand.

“It’s—quite right and just,” she said.

“No, by Heaven it’s not. I never dreamed that you’d rush off like this———”

She stared. “What else could I have done?”

He faced her, his eyebrows knitted and his eyes troubled to a softness she had certainly never seen in them before.

“Look here,” he said, “this is all nonsense.” (Yes, that was it; she was paler and thinner; she looked older too. That was the difference he had noticed at first.) “You know very well that the mere fact of my mother being older than yours can’t in human justice give me your property. You were brought up to it, I wasn’t. I can do without it. I don’t need anything of the kind. I don’t belong, whereas you—you grow there. You must go back—at once.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“What do your people say?”

Pamela smiled a rather rueful smile.

“They don’t like your going off like this? And why is it—like this?”

She blushed hotly. “I haven’t enough of my own to live on. I have a little—oh, don’t look like that! I know now that it’s more than lots of girls———”

“Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t, Pamela. Don’t rub it in. You must go back, and then everything will be all right———”

“Stop. You mustn’t talk like that. Don’t you see that it’s absolutely impossible? I—I feel awful when I think that I had it all those years, and—and I can’t pay you back.”

“Oh, shut up! It’s you who are mad. (Don’t look so startled.) Look here—if I had been brought up at