“Don’t you worry one little bit, Polkadot dar-rling,” she urged, leaning to one of the pinto’s forward-flicking ears. “If it isn’t all right by to-morrow-day, Irene will come around herself and rub it well for you.” When Dot, having received no “cure” signal, limped more noticeably than before as they neared his stable-hostelry, she added in her sweet-lisped baby talk: “Just a few steps more, booful boy. Don’t ‘oo care. You’ll be all well to-morrow-day.” Considering the tenderness of her mood toward the four-footed fakir, her change was sudden and radical toward the biped of the pair when she grasped that he intended to send her home in a taxi. “You’re not going to _take_ me?” she demanded through the down-dropped sash of the door he had closed. “If you’ll excuse me, no, Miss Sturgis. I am very sorry to miss the pleasure and sorrier if I seem discourteous. But I—I owe a duty to a friend.” She looked with a hard glance straight into his eyes, her lips thinning. “Then you think more of your _horse_ than you do of me?” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he temporized. She pressed the point. “You may think I lack reserve, Mr. Pape. Sometimes I myself feel that I am too impulsive and too—too honest.” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he repeated. It was the best he could offer and he was in doubt about that. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” she snapped. “But why don’t you assume a virtue if you have it not—why not be a little bit honest yourself? Why not answer the truth? Heaven knows I might better learn it now than later. Tell me, Why-Not, is it only Polkadot for whom you are deserting me?” Pape tried unobtrusively to give the chauffeur the start signal; shifted his weight; cleared his throat. “Well, it isn’t exactly—not entirely on account of the horse, although a man’s cayuse is his cayuse and that’s that. No, miss. You see, we were kind of late starting, owing to your change of—of habits. And I have a friend that I’m sort of committed to help because she—he——” But his impromptu defense merged into her high-pitched scorn which, in its turn, merged into tears before she was through. “I knew it. I _divined_ it. And me meriting a man’s whole soul! Kindly tell the driver to start at once. As for you, Peter Stansbury Pape, I think you’re _contemptible_!” Grooms were caring for the horses on Pape’s return to the stable. The “cripple” he miraculously cured by a word and a touch. In his dressing room, he hurried into street clothes. Out in the park, beneath that clump of poplars—— Talking was all very well in its way. But at last he had sighted something to _do_! CHAPTER XIII—IN HER SERVICE