He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He had certainly promised her his help--but before he knew what he was promising. He met Madame de Chantelle’s appeal by replying: “If there were anything I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner’s favour.” “You’d want it to be--yes! But could you make it so?” “As far as facts go, I don’t see how I can make it either for or against her. I’ve already said that I know nothing of her except that she’s charming.” “As if that weren’t enough--weren’t all there OUGHT to be!” Miss Painter put in impatiently. She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her small eyes were fixed on her friend. “Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine,” she pursued, “that a young American girl ought to have a dossier--a police-record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country it’s enough to know that a young girl’s pure and lovely: people don’t immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list.” Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. “You don’t expect me not to ask if she’s got a family?” “No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn’t. The fact that she’s an orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit. You won’t have to invite her father and mother to Givre!” “Adelaide--Adelaide!” the mistress of Givre lamented. “Lucretia Mary,” the other returned--and Darrow spared an instant’s amusement to the quaint incongruity of the name--“you know you sent for Mr. Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?” “You think it’s perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know nothing about?” “No; but I don’t think it’s perfectly simple to prevent him.” The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow’s interest in Miss Painter. She had not hitherto struck him as being a person of much penetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to the heart of any practical problem. Madame de Chantelle sighed out her recognition of the difficulty. “I haven’t a word to say against Miss Viner; but she’s knocked about so, as it’s called, that she must have been mixed up with some rather dreadful people. If only Owen could be made to see that--if one could get at a few facts, I mean. She says, for instance, that she has a sister; but it seems she doesn’t even know her address!”