“Oh, don’t you look dar-rling in those clothes?” she exclaimed on her way to Pape, “I never saw _anything_ quite so heroic. I didn’t _dream_, Why-Not, that you were the ‘good friend’ in need of bail. I am just too _happy_ about it for anything—oh, not that you are in trouble, of course, but that you’d send for me. I’ve always been _crazy_ to see the inside of this Arsenal. Police courts and jails and insane asylums just _fascinate_ me. Don’t they you—or _do_ they? Maybe I have a morbid tendency, but I enjoy it. It’s always the unexpected that really happens, isn’t it? I wasn’t in an expecting or hoping mood at all to-night and here you, of all people, go and get yourself arrested and send for me and—and _everything_! I forgive you for the past and love you all the more in trouble. But that’s as it should be, isn’t it? How could any true woman resist you in those clothes and in this——” Of necessity she paused for breath—paused verbally, not materially. Reaching Pape, she lifted a look of utter adoration that would have made almost any man’s heart do an Immerman flop—lifted also two bare, soft-curved, elbow-dinted arms about his neck. “I didn’t mean a word of what I said this morning at the end of our ride,” she confessed in an aside voiced _a la_ the histrionics of yesteryear. “Of course I couldn’t seriously call you contemptible, when my deeper nature knows there’s a noble reason back of all that you do. You’ll forget it except as a lover’s quarrel, won’t you, dar-rling? It is in need and affliction, don’t you think, that one’s real feelings should come to the surface? I’m not one bit ashamed to tell you that I’ve been perfectly _miserable_. Haven’t you been, too, Why-Not?” “I ain’t just comfortable,” he admitted, untieing the lover’s knot at the back of his neck. “Mother,” her blue eyes on the red flame of his countenance, looked as though she believed him, but as though she didn’t feel “just comfortable” either. In truth, her heart, too, had done some sort of a flop, then had dropped as if dead. She shrank further back into her rusty mourning garb, but did not miss a movement of the two baby-soft hands of her cousin, the one holding the Westerner’s arm, the other stroking the same member as though to limber up its strain. “What dire deed have you done, dar-rling?” The girl’s voice was intense from the thrill of her rescue role. “Tell Rene all—at least all. It is such a revelation that you should appeal to me first in trouble. You _always_ will, won’t you—or will you? But then, _of course_ you will.” With the eyes of three of the police upon him, Pape’s situation would have been trying enough. Faced also by the amaze which he could better imagine than see in the shadow of that bonnet-brim, he felt desperate. Truly, Jane’s wish to avoid alarming her aunt had brought real trouble upon him—more real than any he could explain to this child vampire. “There ain’t much to tell, Miss Sturgis,” he began. “Not anything serious enough to——”