Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a microscope rises out of the tube. "I’m a plain man, Mr. Burley," he said, imperturbably. "And I speak plainly. If you don’t like plain speaking, I’d better withdraw my application." "The hell you’d better!" Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes. Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel. "Sit down," said Burley, suddenly limp. Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized. "Tell you what," he said, after a while. "I need a sort of confidential assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?" He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard tenements. "Trust me," said Mark Pryor. He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of his own. "And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine," added Burley. "To get a line on the diamond smuggling?" asked Pryor, with the most casual air imaginable. Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion. "What in blazes are you talking about?" he said. "Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir," said Pryor soothingly. "At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler. More than one person will remember that remark." Burley’s suspicions were disarmed. "Forget it, my friend, forget it," he said. "A man says a good many things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I don’t suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their importations than the other big jewelers are. That’s no business of mine or yours, however, is it?" He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine’s doings had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr. He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man. Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were nobody’s property. That was no blasted secret, was it? "But this Janet Barr’s no Lorillard female," he said, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk. "Any fool can see that. And I’m man enough, to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name." "You don’t mean to say that he has—" "He’ll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he’s just got engaged to Armstrong’s daughter?"