"Eh?--I'm tangled up like a basket of ticker-tape. You see, Campbell, I drink; candor compels me to acknowledge that much. In a moment of folly I was indiscreet, and ever since I have been trying to apologize. I have borne garlands of roses, offers of devotion, plaintive invitations to dine, but--the Circuit is a trick theater and it has a thousand doors. All I have to show for my efforts at reparation is a bad cold, a worse temper, and a set of false teeth which the doorman pledged with me for a loan of ten dollars. I have Mr. Regan's dental frieze in my bureau-drawer--but they only grin at me in derision. In short, I'm in Dutch, and there sits the adorable cause of my sorrows." In spite of Wharton's reproachful tone, the gaze he bent upon Lorelei was good-humored, and she saw that he was in a mood different to any she had ever seen him in. Strange to say, he was sober, or nearly so, and he was plainly determined to make her like him. "Has he annoyed you, Miss Knight?" asked Pope. "Dreadfully." Wharton explained further. "The first time we met I deserved to be slapped, and I was. You see, I was ruder than usual. But I have sobered up purposely to apologize; I have repented, and--well, here we are, thanks to brother James." "Thanks to--Jim?" Lorelei raised her brows. Pope turned to young Knight and said, politely, "That is my foot you are stamping on." Ignoring Jim's mute appeal, Wharton ran on smilingly: "He promised to shackle you to a table until I could stammer out my halting apologies, and now that I've done so in the presence of press and public won't you forgive me and help me to bury the hatchet in a Welsh rarebit?" He was speaking directly to her with a genuine appeal in his handsome eyes. Now that she saw him in his right mind, it was unexpectedly hard to resist him, for he was very boyish and friendly--quite unlike the person who had so grievously offended her.