But I just _couldn't_! I wanted her by and by to marry some one tall and handsome and altogether splendid. In fact, a _Man_. And if a man were a Man, it didn't matter whether he were a Cophetua or not. So I listened quite disgustedly as Mr. Ed Caspian answered Pat's piteous question about the newspapers, and criticised his affected accent. I think he fancied it English. "Oh, it happens to lots of the best men," he set out to console her, "to be in the papers that way. There's nothing in it! I shouldn't have noticed, had it been some chap I'd never heard of. And then, Kidd's Pines, don't you know! That's a famous place. There was a picture of it in the Sunday _Times_, and something about its history. I've always wanted to see the house. May I come down, Miss Moore? There might be ways I could help you--your father, I mean--if I could look around and study the situation. For instance, it might pay me--actually _pay_ me (no question of obligations)--to lend money on the place enough to set Mr. Moore right with his creditors and enough over to begin again." "I don't understand," said Pat. "Oh, you _spider_!" said I, in my mind, also perhaps with my eyes. I refrained from saying it with my lips, however, because after all, you see, I was a new friend of Pat's and mustn't stick my fingers into the mechanism of her fate without being sure I could improve its working. Jack and I aren't millionaires, especially since the war broke out and all our pet investments slumped. That convalescent home for soldiers we're financing at Folkestone eats up piles of money, to say nothing of the Belgian refugees to whom we've given up Edencourt. There are fourteen families, and not less than seven children in the smallest, the largest has sixteen--the average is ten. Is your brain equal to the calculation? Mine isn't, but our purse _has_ to be; for we've guaranteed to clothe as well as feed the lot for the duration of the war, and I hear we're keeping a shoe factory working double time. I felt that the most we could do in a financial way for dear Pat would be to pay duty on her car and clothes, and see that, personally, she lacked for nothing. Whatever Mr. Caspian's motives might be, I dared not choke him off on my own responsibility, and Jack said not a word. So I swallowed that "spider," but just as I was choking it down and Caspian was beginning to explain his noble, disinterested scheme, Mrs. Shuster and the S. M. (for that in future please read Ship's Mystery) bore down upon the letter "M."