He sat at her bidding on the chair he had risen from, subsiding into the small, shrunken figure in the middle of enveloping folds of overcoat. One hand hung down between his knees holding his hat. He looked at Mariposa and then looked down at the hat. “Cold afternoon, isn’t it?” he said. “Very cold,” she responded, “but I like it. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.” “Not very,” he looked up at her, blinking near-sightedly through the glasses; “I don’t know whether you know what my name is, Miss Moreau? It’s Shackleton--Winslow Shackleton. I forgot my card.” Mariposa felt a lightning-like change come over her face, in which there was a sudden stiffening of her features into something hard and repellent. To Win, at that moment, she looked very like his father. “Oh!” she said, hearing her voice drop at the end of the interjection with a note of vague disapproval and uneasiness. “I’ve seen you,” continued Win, “once at _The Trumpet_ office, when you were there with Mrs. Willers. I don’t think you saw me. I was back in the corner, near the table where Jack--that’s the boy--sits.” Mariposa murmured: “No, I didn’t see you.” She hardly knew what he said or what she responded. What did _this_ mean? What was going to happen now? “You must excuse my coming this way, without an introduction or anything, but as you knew my father and mother, I--I--thought you wouldn’t mind.” He glanced at her again, anxiously, she thought, and she said suddenly, with her habitual directness: “Did you come from your mother?” “No, I came on--on--my own hook. I wanted”--he looked vaguely about and then laid his hat on a table near him--“I wanted to see you on business of my own.” The nervousness from which he was evidently suffering began to communicate itself to Mariposa. The Shackleton family had come to mean everything that was painful and agitating to her, and here was a new one wanting to talk to her about business that she knew, past a doubt, was of some unusual character. “If you’ve come to talk to me about going to Europe,” she said desperately, “I may as well tell you, there’s no use. I won’t go to Paris now, as I once said I would, and there’s no good trying to make me change my mind. Your mother and Mrs. Willers have both tried to, and it’s very kind of them, but I--can’t.” She had an expression at once of fright and determination. The subject was becoming a nightmare to her, and she saw herself attacked again from a strange quarter, and with, she imagined, a new set of arguments. “It’s nothing to do with going to Europe,” he said. “It’s--it’s”--he put up one of the long, bony hands, and with the two first fingers pressed his glasses back against his eyes, then dropped the hand and stared at Mariposa, the eyes looking strangely pale and prominent behind the powerful lenses. “It’s something that’s just between you and me,” he said. She surveyed him without answering, her brows drawn, her mind concentrated on him and on what he could mean.