Glenning merely repeated his last speech, enunciating it more clearly. Dillard sank back in his chair, a nerveless mass. "You mean you're goin' to _give_ them this money!" he gasped; "this little fortune!" John's arm shot out across the table, and his slim fingers twined about the soft hand which lay there, inert. "See here, Tom Dillard!" he said, earnestly. "You say you are a friend to these people. I believe you, or I'd never have taken you into my confidence. I'm their friend, too, and Fate has said that I shall be the one to bring relief to them in their present predicament. Promise me to work with me, now, to the perfecting of some plan, and to keep all this a secret to your dying day! Promise, boy, and then we'll plot!" "Yes, I promise!" replied Dillard, in an awed voice. "But are you sick, or crazy, or--" "Neither. I've nothing. Let that alone. It has nothing to do with this." A dull flush was on the speaker's face. "Then--" began Dillard, but he stopped, reddened, and glanced aside. In that moment jealousy was added to his other worries. He had never supposed for an instant that Doctor Glenning was in love with Julia Dudley. The idea was silly, for their acquaintance had been limited to a few days. But what did this mean? His mind was not preternaturally acute; in fact, he was rather dull than bright, but a simpleton would have cause to suspect something when a man, himself almost penniless, was willing to sacrifice a considerable sum of money in order that a destitute old man and his lovely daughter should not suffer humiliation and hunger. It was possible for this act to be one of pure philanthropy, but even Dillard's slow-moving intellect could not see it in that light. It simply meant that another man had found and appreciated this sheltered flower of womanhood that he had watched grow, and bud, and bloom, and that she had aroused in this other man a passion akin to his own. These thoughts traveled with unusual rapidity through Dillard's brain, the while his companion sat with head thrust forward, watching him. "Then--what?" queried Glenning. "What were you going to say?" "What are you doing this for?" "What would _you_ do it for, if you could?" "Friendship for the family," was the somewhat sullen reply. "Friendship fiddlesticks!" retorted John. "You'd do it for no such reason, but for that sweet girl-woman in distress!" He brought his fist down on the table as he said this so that the lamp jumped and the blaze shot up the chimney, and glared defiance at the man across from him. Dillard's heart seemed trying to pump the blood through his skin, but he only looked at John as though he had been addressed in Arabic or Chinese.