“You look as if you had been taking a turn at the windlass yourself, Harry. Have you?” “Yes, something of that sort,” replied Antrim, but he turned quickly to the papers on his desk. “Nothing that I can help you figure out, is it?” “No,” said the chief clerk, so savagely that Brant smiled. “Which the same is none of _my_ business, and so we are quits,” he rejoined. Antrim was much too good-hearted to let the matter rest there, and he made halting amends. “I would give you a chance, Brant, quicker than I would anybody else I know; but it is no use. Every fellow has to take his own medicine.” Brant nodded, and after a little Antrim went on as one who changes the subject. “Been over to the Highlands lately?” “No.” “I thought you hadn’t. Dorothy was asking about you the last time I saw her.” “When was that?” The question was so eager that Antrim, remembering his unjust suspicion of Isabel, had a pang of honest shame. “Last Wednesday. She wanted to know if you had left town.” Brant was plunged at once into a problem in which there were many more unknown quantities than integral facts. When he came to the surface it was to catch at a straw. Perhaps, after all, Dorothy was yet in happy ignorance of all the distressing things her mother could tell her; in which case she had merely failed to see him when he had lifted his hat to her the day before. And, if that were true, his late excursion into the realm of things evil was nothing better than the sequence of a hideous mistake. The logic of the thing appalled him, and he made haste to go back to first principles, planting himself desperately upon the assertion that she must have seen him. Having done that, he was immediately swept adrift again by an overwhelming desire to know the truth of the matter beyond peradventure of doubt. A suggestion offered, and he pounced upon it. He would make an unconscious messenger of Antrim. “When are you going over there again, Harry?” he asked, making the question as incurious as might be. “I don’t know,” replied the chief clerk, burying his face in his desk. “Well, when you do, if Miss Langford asks you any more questions about me, you may say that I haven’t been away, but that I am going before long.” Antrim looked up with a puzzled frown. “I don’t begin to know what you are driving at. Why don’t you go and tell her yourself; you know the way.” It was Brant’s turn to prevaricate, and he did it so clumsily that Antrim stopped him in sheer pity. “That will do,” he interrupted. “You are only getting tangled up in a lot of polite lies, and that doesn’t help matters. Besides, if it is a question of carrying messages to Hollywood, I can’t help you; I am out of the running myself--no, don’t ask any questions, please. I can’t talk about the thing, even to so good a friend as you are.”