This would mean not only an opportunity to handle all the Hilmer business itself, but to control other insurance that Hilmer had his finger in. There would be no silent partners, no gratuitous assistance from either clients or wife, no evasions. From this moment on everything was to be upon a frank and open basis. He went out at once to see Hilmer. His wife answered the door as she had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the night before. He had a sense of intrusion--he felt that he was being tolerated. Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb. He noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely to the polished surface of the oak piano. A magazine sprawled face downward on the floor. Already the impress of Mrs. Hilmer on the surroundings was becoming a trifle blurred. He came at once to the point--he had a business proposition to make to Hilmer and he wished to see him. But Helen was not to be excluded from the secret of his mission that easily. The doctor had denied anybody access to Hilmer; therefore, unless it was very urgent... "I want to see about a partnership arrangement," Fred explained, finally. Helen stirred in her seat. "You mean that you want him to go in with us?... What's the reason? He's satisfied." Fred drew himself up. "But I'm not!" he answered, decidedly. She shrugged. "We've had one experience...we'd better think twice before we make another break." "_I've_ thought it all over," he replied, pointedly. She colored and flashed a sharp glance at him. "I spoke to him about the premiums this morning... He tells me he ordered them paid." "Yes ... direct to the companies... That's one of the reasons that made me decide to get things on a better working basis... I'm tired of being an object of charity." She smiled coldly. Well, Hilmer simply wouldn't receive anyone now, and she herself didn't see the reason for haste. He ended by telling her the reason ... there was no other way out of the situation. "Oh," she drawled, when he had finished, "so getting rid of Brauer was _too_ easy, after all!" She made no other comment, but he read her scornful glance. "Any fool would have guessed that!" was what it implied. Still, even with the fact of Brauer's craftiness exposed, she could not be persuaded that the proposition was quite that urgent. "You don't?" he inquired, with growing irritation. "Well, you've forgotten that check for some six hundred-odd dollars I wrote for Brauer the other day... I presume you know it's a felony to give out checks when there aren't sufficient funds on deposit." She stared at him. "That's absurd!" she exclaimed. "Brauer wouldn't go that far!" He quite agreed there, but he didn't say so. Instead, he insisted that anything was possible. They argued the matter scornfully. In the end he won.