"You know well enough I'm not." This time the reproach was not unconscious. "But you haven't answered my question. I have a horrible suspicion, and I want to know." "It was Connie's mistake. I was to meet them at the station at half past four--I am sure she said half past four--and when I went down I found the train had been gone an hour. Did you ever hear of such a thing?" Miss Van Vetter did not know that the small arch-plotter had exhausted her ingenuity trying to devise some less primitive means of accomplishing her purpose; but Bartrow gave Connie full credit for act and intention. "She'd do worse things than that; she wouldn't stick at anything to carry her point," he said unguardedly. Myra laughed again. "I hope you don't ask me to believe that she did it purposely," she said. "Oh, no; of course not. I don't ask you to believe anything--except that I'm foolishly glad you missed the train," rejoined the downright one, beginning to find himself. "Are you, really? I was almost ready to doubt it." Bartrow was not yet fit to measure swords of repartee with any one, least of all with Miss Van Vetter, and the quicksand of speechlessness engulfed him. His helplessness was so palpable that it presently became infectious, and Myra was dismayed to find herself growing sympathetically self-conscious. Her letter lay between their last meeting and this, and she began to wonder if that were the barrier. When the silence became portentous, Bartrow gathered himself for another dash toward enlargement. It was that or asphyxia. The very air of the room was heavy with the narcosis of embarrassment. "Your letter came yesterday," he began abruptly. "Did it? And you have come to tell me to--to tell me to mind my own business? as I said you might?" "No, indeed, I haven't. But I can't do it, all the same--drag your friend in on the Myriad." "Was Mr. Lansdale mistaken? Don't you need more capital to go on with?" "Need it?--well, yes; rather. But I can't take your Mr. Grimsby's money." "Why not?" "Because"--the low-pitched hollow of the big lounging-chair seemed to put him at a disadvantage, and he struggled up out of it to tramp back and forth before her--"well, in the first place, because he _is_ your friend; and if he wasn't, I have no security to offer him--collateral, I suppose he'd call it." "He is not exactly my friend, within your meaning of the word; and he will not ask you to secure him." He stopped and looked down upon her. She was shading her eyes from the sheen of the reading-lamp and turning the leaves of the book. "What does he know about the Little Myriad? anything more than you have told him?" "No." "And yet you say he is willing to put up money on it?" "He is ready to help you--yes." Bartrow's brows went together in a frown of perplexity. "As long as I'm not going to let him, I suppose I haven't any right to ask questions, but"--