"Yet, I fell in love with you, and I said to myself, 'I'll wait for her.' However, I didn't want to wait eternally. For eight years, I have danced willing attendance--following you through nursery, younger-set and _débutante_ stages. In short, with no wish to trumpet too loudly my own virtues, I've been your _Fidus Achates_." His voice dropped from its pitch of antic whimsey, and became for a moment grave, as he added: "And, because of my love for you, I've lived a life almost as clean as your own." "One's _Fidus Achates_, if I remember anything of my Latin, which I don't"--the girl spoke in that voice which the man loved best, because it had left off bantering, and become grave with such softness and depth of timbre as might have trembled in the reed pipes of a Sylvan Pan--"is one's really-truly friend. Everything that you claim for yourself is admitted--and many other things that you haven't claimed. Now, suppose you give me three minutes to make an accusation on other charges. They're not very grave faults, perhaps, by the standards of your world and mine, but to me, personally, they seem important." Wilfred nodded, and said, gravely: "I am waiting." "In the first place, you are one of those men whose fortunes are listed in the top schedule--the swollen fortunes. Socialists would put you in the predatory class." "Drennie," he groaned, "do you keep your heaven locked behind a gate of the Needle's Eye? It's not my fault that I'm rich. It was wished on me. If you are serious, I'm willing to become poor as Job's turkey. Show me the way to strip myself, and I'll stand shortly before you begging alms." "To what end?" she questioned. "Poverty would be quite inconvenient. I shouldn't care for it. But hasn't it ever occurred to you that the man who wears the strongest and brightest mail, and who by his own confession is possessed of an alert brain, ought occasionally to be seen in the lists?" "In short, your charge is that I am a shirker--and, since it's the same thing, a coward?" Adrienne did not at once answer him, but she straightened out for an uninterrupted run before the wind, and by the tiny moss-green flecks, which moments of great seriousness brought to the depths of her eyes, he knew that she meant to speak the unveiled truth. "Besides your own holdings in a lot of railways and things, you handle your mother's and sisters' property, don't you?" He nodded. "In a fashion, I do. I sign the necessary papers when the lawyers call me up, and ask me to come down-town." "You are a director in the Metropole Trust Company?" "Guilty." "In the Consolidated Seacoast?" "I believe so." "In a half-dozen other things equally important?" "Good Lord, Drennie, how can I answer all those questions off-hand? I don't carry a note-book in my yachting flannels." Her voice was so serious that he wondered if it were not, also, a little contemptuous. "Do you have to consult a note-book to answer those questions?"