"Come immediately. Unfortunate complication here. Require you to explain fully.--HERIOT WALKINGSHAW." He looked considerably sobered. "Of course I didn't really mean what I was saying--" Lucas interrupted him brusquely. "I'm off. Look after things here. What the devil--" He strode down the lane, hailed a cab, and drove off to an accompaniment of the most anxious speculations. "This way, sir," said the attendant at the Hotel Gigantique. Lucas followed him, still racking his brains for some explanation not too disastrous to his hopes. The man opened the door of a sitting-room and closed it quietly behind him. In the room there was only one person, a girl with the sunniest hair and the straightest little nose and the most delightfully astonished face imaginable. "Jean!" he cried. He took a quick step towards her and then remembered the gravity of the summons. "What's the matter?" he demanded. "Then it was you!" she exclaimed. "Me?" "Father only told me that some one--a man--" He held out the telegram abruptly. "What do you make of that?" She read it, and then read it again, and her bewilderment seemed to change into another emotion. "What did your father tell you to do?" asked Lucas. She gave him the queerest look. "Get rid of the man if I could," she said. He ran his fingers through his mop of brown hair. "But I don't understand--what's the 'complication'?" She began to smile shyly-- "Lucas, don't you think--don't you see--there's nothing else. _I_ must be the complication here." * * * * * "Ahem!" coughed Mr. Walkingshaw. The lovers endeavored to look as though the artist had been merely posing his patron's daughter. "Well?" inquired that patron genially. Lucas had not altogether lost his ready audacity. "I came at once, sir," he replied, "and I have explained fully. The complication has been cleared up." Laughing gleefully, chattering away much more like the prospective best man than the future father-in-law, he led them (an arm thrown about each) towards the sofa, where they sat together, crowded but happy. "What would you put your income at now, Lucas?" he inquired mischievously. Lucas looked a little rueful. "The same fluctuating figures, I'm afraid," he confessed. "My dear fellow, don't worry," said Heriot kindly. "Money isn't everything in this world. Youth and love and pluck are the main things. Hang it, what if you do get into debt occasionally? You've got a pretty oofy father-in-law. Of course, my dear chap, I don't encourage extravagance; far from it"--he glanced complacently at the chaste upholstery of the Hotel Gigantique. "I believe in paying your way, and laying by for a rainy day, and all that kind of thing, just as much as ever I did--in theory, anyhow. But in practice I may just as well tell you at once, to ease your mind, that Jean will have three hundred a year to keep the pot boiling." He pooh-poohed their gratitude with the most genial air.