His startled glance caught her. He was on his feet at once. “Oh, Mrs. Cutter! This is indeed good of you. I was afraid you would not see me,” he exclaimed, hurrying to meet her. “Mr. Shippen!” she gasped, with no marks of pleasure in the look she gave him. It was strictly interrogative, unfeelingly so. “Yes,” he returned hastily, interpreting her manner. “I came down to look after the sale of that mining property. Couldn’t resist dropping in on my way back to town this afternoon. Wanted to see you.” She moved past him, sat down some distance beyond and fixed her wide blue gaze upon him. He followed, not quite sure about sitting, feeling somehow that she might be going to keep him on his feet. Still he risked it and chose a chair politely removed from her immediate neighborhood, which was chilly, he could not tell whether or not from design. “You wish to see me?” she asked after a pause. The question disconcerted him. He flushed, recovered himself and showed his teeth in a handsome smile. “Yes, do you mind?” he retorted. “But what do you want to see me about?” she insisted, as if this must be a matter of business, a painful business, since she knew that he was associated with her husband. He snickered nervously, recovered his gravity at once, warned by the tightening of her lips. “When are you coming to New York?” he asked suddenly. She drew back from this adder of a question. “Is this why you came--you were sent?” she barely breathed the words, laying a hand like a confession upon her breast. “I was not sent,” he returned quickly. “You understand?” She signified that she did with a nod of her head. She released him for one moment from her steady gaze; then she fixed her eyes on him again with the same interrogative suspense, as much as to say, “Well, then, if you were not sent, why are you here?” She could not sense a meaning that would have been plain to another woman. It was the stupidity of goodness, he decided, and was charmed by a certain experimental fear of her. He must proceed cautiously. That was the delightful part of it, to be obliged to watch his step in an affair of this kind. He had no doubt of his ultimate success--a married woman, abandoned by her husband. He knew all about that by inference from Cutter. Cutter was too brazen in the conducting of his “bachelor” apartments not to feel perfectly safe. He supposed there had been some sort of financial adjustment between him and his wife. He knew very well that the situation in New York would not last. Cutter was simply the profitable investment a certain beautiful and brilliant woman had chosen, who had the record of a sentimental rocket among the sporting financiers of the East. The first time he came a cropper in the markets, she would abandon him with the swiftness and insolence that would make the fellow’s head swim. Then Cutter would return to his wife. They always did.