David resumed his seat. She stood thinking a moment, then went to a writing-desk. For all his suspense, David was aware she was trying to display her graces and her gown. She rustled to his chair with the unhinged halves of a gold locket in her hand. "Suppose we begin here," she said, handing him one half of the locket. "Perhaps you'll recognise it--though that was taken in eighty-five." David did recognise it. It was Lillian Drew at twenty. The face was fresh and spirited, and had in an exceptional measure the sort of beauty admired in the front row of a musical-comedy chorus. It was not a bad face; had the girl's previous ten years been otherwise, the present Lillian Drew would have been a very different woman; but the face showed plainly that she had gone too far for any but an extraordinary power or experience to turn her about. It was bold, striking, luring--a face of strong appeal to man's baser half--telling of a girl who would make advances if the man held back. David felt that she waited for praise. "It's a handsome face." "You're not the first to say so," she returned, proudly. She let him gaze at the picture a full minute, keenly watching his face for her beauty's effect. Then she continued: "That is the picture of a girl in Boston. And this"--a jewelled hand gave him the locket's other half--"is a young man in Harvard." David knew whose likeness was in the locket, yet something snapped sharply within him when he looked upon the boyish face of Morton at twenty-one. It was the snap of suspense. His fear was now certainty. "She probably wouldn't have suited you"--the tone declared she certainly would--"but Phil Morton certainly had it bad for four or five months." David forced himself to his duty--to search this relationship to its limits. "And then--he broke it off?" he asked, with a sudden desire to make her smart. "No man ever threw me down," she returned sharply, her cheeks flushing. "I got tired of him. A woman soon gets tired of a mere boy like that. And he was repenting about a third of the time, and preaching to me about reforming myself. To live with a man like that----it's not living. I dropped him." "But all this was fifteen years ago," David said, calm by an effort. "What has that to do with your note?" She sank into a chair before him, and ran the tip of her tongue between her thin lips. She leaned back luxuriously, clasped her be-ringed hands behind her head, and regarded him amusedly from beneath her pencilled eye-lashes.