"Thank you; that is a proposal which I am afraid I must decline. Mrs. Lamb might suspect us of conspiracy if we bore down on her in force. I will be in Connaught Square to-morrow evening, but perhaps a little late, when I think it possible, Miss Wallace, that one glance at your countenance will be sufficient to tell me exactly how the matter stands. Remember the arbitrament of my fate--as a manager, an issue of no slight consequence--is in your hands." "Poor, innocent, ignorant Mrs. Lamb!" exclaimed Miss Johnson. "Meg, if she only knew what issues of life and death you are bringing with you, I don't believe she'd let you into her house--however nicely Harry might ask her permission to bring you." The young lady spoke much truer than she knew. CHAPTER XX THE IMPENDING SWORD "I must have ten thousand pounds, and"--Mrs. J. Lamb paused--"within a week." "Must!" Mr. Isaac Luker folded his hands together with a gesture which suggested the act of prayer. He seemed singularly out of place in his environment. They were in the apartment which Mrs. Lamb called her boudoir, a word which has a different meaning in the mouths of different women. In this case it stood for a room which represented what was possibly the last word in gorgeous decoration. Everything was of the costliest. If the result was a trifle vivid, it was not altogether unpleasing. It was a room in which one could be very much at one's ease--in certain moods--if one were of a certain constitution. There was something in its atmosphere which made a not ineffective appeal to the senses, not so much to the sense of beauty or of intellect, as to that of physical well-being. In some subtle way the owner's strong personality impregnated the whole place. On crossing the threshold a person of delicate perception might have become immediately conscious of something which could scarcely have been called healthy.