“My mind was naturally disturbed,” she went on. “It is a shocking thing, Mr. Barrison, to find yourself cast adrift when you have been counting on a thing, believing in it——” “I should scarcely have thought that it would be so awful,” Jim ventured, “for you, who surely need not remain in such a predicament any longer than you care to.” She flashed him a grateful glance. “That is nice of you. But I truly think that it is worse in a case like mine. One grows accustomed to things. It is somewhat appalling to find oneself without them, to find them snatched away before one’s eyes. You see, I have never been ‘fired’ before.” She uttered the last words with a surprisingly nice laugh. “It was rather terrible, truly. I asked Alan Mortimer to-day who you were,” she said quietly. “When I knew, I determined that I would come to see you.” “And so——” he suggested encouragingly. She was, if this were cleverness, much too clever to change her gentle, rather grave attitude. “And so,” she said, as she leaned upon the table, “I have come to speak to you of the things which a woman does not speak of as a rule.” Jim Barrison was slightly alarmed. “But why come to me?” he protested, though not too discourteously. “We are strangers, and—surely you do not need a detective in your trouble, whatever it is?” “Why not?” she demanded swiftly. “In your career, Mr. Barrison, have you never found yourself close to the big issues of life, the deep and tragic things? Does not the detective’s profession show him the most emotional and terrible and human conditions in all the world? It is as a detective that I want you to help me, Mr. Barrison.” “I—I shall be only too glad,” stammered Barrison, with a full-grown premonition of trouble. He wished the woman had been less subtle; he had no mind to have his sympathies involved. She seemed to guess at something of his worry, for she lifted her black-fringed eyes to his and laughed—not gayly, but sadly. “It’s all said very quickly,” she told him. “Alan Mortimer used to be in love with me; he is not now.” Barrison found himself dumb. What on earth could a man say to a woman under such circumstances? He was no ladies’ man, and such homely sympathy as he had sometimes had to proffer to women in distress seemed highly out of place here. Miss Templeton, in her beauty and her strangeness, struck him as belonging to a class in herself. Resourceful as he was, he had not the right word just then. She did not appear to miss it, though. She went on, almost at once, with the kind of mournful calmness which nearly always wins masculine approbation: