“I have, sir, I have,” quoth the painter with a bow. Bess, who had taken a liking to this ugly but honest-eyed man, smiled at him, and held out a hand. “I thank you for having helped us,” she said. “Don’t thank me, madam,” retorted the painter, bluntly. “Mr. Richard here is quite capable of fighting his own battles.” They laughed—the three of them, Bess and Jeffray looking into each other’s eyes. Wilson still studying with inevitable admiration the face and figure of the woman who had changed a dreamer into a man of fire and action. Peter Gladden was waiting at the hall-door, smirking, and rubbing his smooth chin with his fingers. Jeffray, giving his hand to Bess, led her with an Old-World courtliness up the steps and into the house. The butler stood aside, bowing and fixing his eyes deferentially upon his master’s shoes. He cast a peering, birdlike glance at Bess after she had passed, grinned as he caught Mr. Wilson’s eye, and smothered the smirk instantly as the painter’s stare snubbed him. Jeffray led Bess to the dining-room where supper had been spread hastily upon the table. He drew back a chair for her, dismissed Gladden, who came in with a mincing shuffle, and prepared to wait on Bess in person. “You must eat,” he said, bending slightly over her chair. She lay back and looked at him, her eyes shining through her half-closed lashes. “I am not hungry.” “No, but you must keep up your strength. I will carve you some venison, and here is good red wine. I shall stand behind your chair till I am satisfied with you. And then—” “And then?” she said, smiling with her eyes. “I shall send you above to bed. The coach will be ready for us at seven. Come now, you must humor me; I have the guarding of your health.” An hour later Bess was lying under the crimson canopy in the great bed above, her limbs between the white sheets, her black hair in a love tangle on the pillow. Jeffray had called Gladden to him in the dining-room, and given him his orders. Poor Gladden imagined that the family dignity must be sinking very deep into the mire. He met the amazing foolhardiness of it all with melancholy stoicism, finished the contents of a half-emptied wine-bottle when his master had gone, and confessed to himself that time and women can wreck empires. Jeffray found Dick Wilson in the library, lighting his pipe at one of the candles, sucking in his cheeks, and looking as solemn over the ceremony as though the truth of immortality hung upon the proper kindling of the weed. He cocked one eye at Jeffray, smiled, and set himself with his back to the mantle-shelf, one white cotton stocking in wrinkles half way down his leg, his waistcoat fastened by two solitary buttons, the folds of the bandage slipping over his left eyebrow. He puffed away at his pipe, while Jeffray turned to the bureau, unlocked it, and took out the letters he had written the previous morning. “You will see these delivered, Dick,” he said, “after I am gone?”