“Not unless he thinks a lot more of her than he does of me,” Clifford grumbled. “Queer situation there, isn’t it?” mused Loveman. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he had treated her the same as he has you.” The lawyer’s tone became humorously lugubrious. “Well, we all have our troubles. Here’s that little Nina Cordova. After I’ve said a fond, swift, and eternal farewell to twenty thousand dollars backing her in that awful frost ‘Orange Blossoms’--honest, a guinea-hen that’d half-swallowed an open safety-pin would pull out its hair and eat bichloride if it had a voice like Nina’s--here’s Nina begging me to back her in a new piece that’s a crippled and half-witted twin to ‘Orange Blossoms.’ Can you beat it! And yet I suppose I’ll come across. That’s just the sort of sucker game I always fall for.” With a gesture of mock despair, the little lawyer--true lover of the best in music and the arts, and patron of the worst--crossed to his table. Clifford knew that Loveman, as well as himself, had been fencing. He wondered whether he had made Loveman believe that he believed in Jack’s northern trip, and that he was unconcerned about Jack and Mary. He thought he had. Clifford, alert for every possible clue, managed to keep an eye on Loveman’s table. Presently he saw a lithe, handsome young man in close conversation with Loveman. It was Hilton, whom from a previous experience he knew to be a suave adventurer in this brilliant border-world wherein smart fashion and glossed scoundrelism mix in easy fellowship. So then Hilton and Loveman, for mutual advantage, had adjusted the financial _contretemps_ which had risen when their plans had crossed that afternoon at the Mordona. This undoubtedly meant that something was brewing. Clifford would have given his balance at the bank and all he could have borrowed there, to have known the exact substance of their talk. After a few minutes Hilton nodded as if some point had been settled, and with the grace of the professional dancer, crossed the great room and went out. Clifford’s first impulse was to follow him, but he thought better of it and kept his place. He had his recompense, for a little later the dainty Nina Cordova entered with an escort. Soon, as if by the ordinary drifting of after-midnight merry-makers, she, too, was conversing with Peter Loveman. Again Clifford would have been glad to trade his cash and credit that he might hear. He knew that this girlish-looking creature had been privately fitted into more than one of Loveman’s adroit plans of this pleasure world; and he remembered, too, that less than a year before there had been the beginning of an affair between Jack and Nina--that she, with fame glittering before her excited vision, had dropped Jack for what she always spoke of as “her art”; and he guessed that now, having been pushed by managerial enterprise beyond her meager merits as a singer in musical comedy, and having toppled ingloriously from her lofty dreams, she might have quite other plans.