Of course, I had made an enemy of the girl and to no purpose. I had felt her physical attraction, and I knew that only by putting myself beyond its pale could I be true to my own convictions as to her venality. She was the kind of woman to whom any man, even such a one as I, is fish for her net. A girl may whet her appetite by coquetry and deprave it by flirtation, setting at last such a value upon her skill at seduction that she counts that day lost in which some male creature is not brought into subjection to her wiles. As I thought over the conversation later in the privacy of my bedroom I began to realize that instead of good I had only done harm. For a warning, such a futile one as I had given would only inflame a girl like Marcia, and the suggestion of danger was just the fillip her jaded tastes required. It was not long before I had a confirmation of my mistake in judgment. A week passed, a week of alternate joys and depressions for Jerry, during which he spoke little to me of the girl. The night after the dinner at the Manor he had upbraided me for telling Marcia the story of his bout with Sagorski. He had not cared to tell her of that event, he said, because he thought it too brutal for the ears of a girl of her delicate and sensitive nature. The next night he spoke of it again, but this time without reserve. It seemed that Marcia was very much interested in his feats of physical strength and hoped that Jerry would permit her to watch him when he sparred. Of course, he didn't see why she shouldn't watch him when he sparred if she was really interested in that sort of thing, but it was curious how he had misjudged her tastes; she seemed so ethereal, so devoted to the gentler things of life, that he had not thought it possible she could care for the rugged art he loved, which at times, as I knew, verged upon the brutal. I mentioned with a smile that there remained in all of us, women as well as men, some relics of the age of stone. "Of course," he assented cheerfully, "I knew she wasn't namby-pamby. It's rather nice of her, I think, to take so much interest." A few days after that Jerry left me and I knew that Briar Hills was closed again. The events which were to follow came upon me with startling unexpectedness. Scarcely two weeks had passed since Jerry's departure and I had hardly settled back into my routine at the Manor, where I was trying again to take up the lost threads of my work, when a message came over the wire from Jack Ballard asking me to come down to New York to visit him for a few days. I inferred from what he said that he wanted to see me about Jerry, and, of course, I lost no time in getting to the city and to his apartment, where I found him before his mirror, tying his cravat. "Pope, my boy, I knew you'd come. Just itching for an excuse anyway, weren't you? But you needn't look so alarmed. Jerry's all right. He hasn't even run off; with a chorus lady or founded a home for non-swearing truckmen."