"I know you are tired. It takes some time to get the New York pace, but you'll strike it. I think I'll stay to see the next Folly with Mr. Farraday," he heard the Violet saying to Miss Adair, and still short-circuited, he went with his calm young author down to the car. The hour was one-thirty, and a moon had climbed the heights of the Broadway canon. Valentine, with some sort of psychic direction, went across Central Park and down wide, clean, silent, and dimly lighted Fifth Avenue. Both Mr. Vandeford and Miss Adair were silent, and he was not aware that she was crying until just before they turned into her side street. "They were so young, those girls, and they--they didn't want to--to do that," she said with little catches in her beautiful, slurring, Blue-grass voice. "Maybe they didn't; but they wouldn't go back now, not one," he answered her. She was silenced, and stood quiet beside him as he opened the door of the big, gloomy, protective building, with the key the woman of another world than his had intrusted to him. "I know," she said at last, as she held out her hand to him. And because it trembled ever so slightly and was cold, he put his warm lips to it for a second before he handed her into a great international safety. He remembered the key, but he didn't give it to her. Somehow he wanted it himself. He liked the feel of it in his pocket. "Wish I had Denny locked up in the Christian association!" he growled to himself as Valentine whirled him home. Just at that exact moment Mr. Dennis Farraday sat in Miss Violet Hawtry's Louis Quinze parlor at the Claridge, engaged in tenderly and awkwardly patting that star's sobbing white shoulder, as she lay on just such a couch as Manon Lescaut probably had had for just such scenes. "I don't blame him at all," sobbed Miss Hawtry, provocatively, with the art of long practice both on the stage and off. "My kind always loses to hers when the time comes." "Don't!" pleaded Mr. Farraday. It was all he could or was willing to plead at that moment. "But I want to make good in this play for him and her--and you--before I go out of his life forever. I want to repay him with--with both money and happiness. He made me an artist." With these words Miss Hawtry made an acknowledgment of the truth that she herself really believed to be untrue, because she saw that to praise Mr. Vandeford was the best way to blind Mr. Farraday while she approached him in that blindness. She knew that his loyalty to his David would be a barrier unless she used it as a ladder. "My God! How--how great women are!" was the immediate and hoped-for response she drew from the big Jonathan.