"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward." "But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business made no reply. The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little cut-glass vase. "Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice. He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl--or was she not a woman?--herself. "Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man. "We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot. Then he touched an electric button and his private secretary appeared with a bundle of notes and documents in his hand, and Cordelia slipped away triumphant. It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two hundred dollars. The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for another scene with her, determined that this time she should not prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own bank and said nothing more of the matter. CHAPTER XVII INEFFECTUAL FLUTTERS She prayed that night for his pure soul, And thanked her new-found God That he returned unscathed and whole To that white world he trod. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight." A woman's last love is always a _rechauffé_ of her first.--"The Silver Poppy." Hartley had to wait in the library for some time; he sat in the dusky, massive room wondering why he should listen so eagerly for Cordelia's step. When she did come down--she had finally surrendered and written him a pitiful, urgent little note complaining of his neglect and her loneliness, and declaring that she must see him at once--she stepped before him resplendent in a shimmering gown of salmon-colored liberty satin, which looked almost yellow in the softened lamplight, subdued by her own careful hand. She was more nervous than she appeared, and she was glad of the half-lights. She had long since discovered that the library was the one room in the Spaulding household where one could sit in assured solitude. The Spauldings, indeed, were not a bookish family, Alfred Spaulding always briskly protesting that he preferred living life to reading it. And when it came to a matter of recreation, he used to say, sixty miles in an automobile knocked the daylights out of sixty chapters of romantic philanderings.