“What a fashion plate!” Angela Hilary exclaimed as she came across her ornate little morning room to greet her guest.

Latham smiled amiably. No one dressed more carefully than he, and he had no mock shyness about having it noted.

“You don’t look especially dowdy yourself,” he returned, as he took in his hand one of her proffered hands and eleven of her rings.

The visit was an unqualified success, and more than once Horace Latham thought ruefully what an ass he had been to fight shy of so delightful a morning.

He was the only guest: it goes without saying, and Latham himself had hoped for nothing else. That he foreknew that it would be a function strictly for two had both assuaged and augmented his maiden nervousness. If this dominant and seductively pretty young widow was determined to press her suit (and quite aside from Helen Bransby’s tormenting prompting he had an odd, fluttering feeling that it was a suit, and not to be side-tracked easily), her opportunities to do so would be tenfolded under her own roof—and they alone. On the other hand, he thought that he could manage himself better, and far more smoothly, safe from the disconcerting flicker of Helen’s mocking eyes, and the not improbable comments, aside and otherwise, of her impish tongue. And, if it came to such stress of issue between them (himself and the widow) that he had no strategical escape left short of brutality, he felt that he would find the exercise of such brutal harshness somewhat less abominable and repugnant when no third one was present to witness Angela’s discomfiture.

But he had misjudged his lady—and soon he sensed it.

Under all her flare for willfulness, and her disconcerting blend of dainty atrocities and personal aplomb, Mrs. Hilary had sound instincts and inherited good taste. She fluttered her skirts with some rumpus of silken frou-frou (to speak in metaphor), but she never lifted them above her ankles. Her home was her temple, she, its goddess, was chaste as erratic, and to her half-southern blood a guest was very sacred.

She gave him an exquisite meal and a thoroughly good time, but she never once made love to him or even gave him a provocative opening to make love to her. And with admirable masculine consistency almost he felt that had she done either or both he might have borne it—yes—cheerfully.

But she did not. She was grave. She was gay. She showed him her cloisonnÉ and her ivories, her etchings and her Sargent, she played to him, and she sang a little. She flattered him, and she gave him some rare dole of subtle petting, but she did no wooing, and seemed inclined to brook none.

What a woman! She set him to thinking. And he thought.

Next to his profession, in which he was deeply absorbed—but not narrowly so, for this dapper, good-looking man was a great physician, and not in-the-making—Horace Latham cared more for music, and needed it more, than he did for anything else—even pictures. All that was most personal to him, all that was strongest and finest in him, quivered and glowed quickest, surest, longest, at the side of a dissecting table, and to the sound of music, violin-sweetness, harp-magic, the song of a piano, the invocation of an organ, the lyric lure of a voice.

But it had to be good music. Helen played prettily, and bored him. Hugh was everlastingly discoursing rag-time with his two first fingers, and Latham itched to chloroform him.

He had never heard Mrs. Hilary attempt music. And when, after lunch, uninvited she sat down at her piano he winced.

She played wonderfully. What a surprising woman! She played Greig to him and Chopin, and then she sang just twice: “Oft in the Stilly Night”—his mother had sung that to him in the dear long-ago, and then a quaint pathetic darky melody that he had never heard before.

“Oh! please,” he begged as she rose.

“No more—to-day,” she told him, “enough is better than too much feast.”

“And what a feast!” he said sincerely.

“Do you like Stephen Pryde?” she demanded abruptly, closing the piano.

“I’ve known him since he was a child.”

She accepted the evasion, or rather, to be more exact, spared him putting its admission into cruder wording.

“Well—you’re wrong. You’re all wrong. I like him. No one else does, except Hugh, and Hugh doesn’t count. But I do: and I like Stephen Pryde immensely.”

“You certainly do count, very much,” Latham told her emphatically. And she did not contradict him by so much as a gesture of her ring-covered hands or a lift of the straight black eyebrows. “Why doesn’t Hugh count?” he asked.

“Because he likes every one. The people who like every one never do count. It is silly. It’s too silly. Now, Stephen Pryde does no such thing.”

“No,” agreed Latham, “he does not; and certainly ‘silly’ is the last word I should employ to describe him.”

“Silly!” Angela said with high scorn. “There isn’t a silly hair on his head. He’s a genius—and he’s hungry—oh! so hungry.”

“Geniuses usually are,” Latham interrupted.

Angela ignored this as it deserved, and he himself thought it feeble and regretted it as soon as he had perpetrated it.

“He’s a genius—and his uncle throttles it. Now, I want you to make Richard Bransby behave—you and Helen. You can, you two; together you can do anything with him.”

“Oh, Mrs. Hilary, please listen to me,” the physician was genuinely alarmed, “on no account must Mr. Bransby be bothered or irritated—positively on none.”

She studied him for a moment. “So,” she said slowly—“as ill as that—poor Helen.”

She did not say, “Poor Mr. Bransby,” and Latham liked her for the nice justice of her differentiation.

“And that’s why you stay here so much.”

Latham made no reply—and she seemed to expect none. She had affirmed; she had asked no question. Really she had some very satisfactory points—most satisfactory!

Then she gave a surprising little cry. “Oh! I am so sorry—so sorry for Helen.”

“I hope,” the doctor began, but she paid no attention to him whatever.

“Don’t you remember?—Wah-No-Tee told me. How wonderful! How stupid of me not to have understood! Oh! I must ’phone for another appointment to-morrow. I mustn’t forget,” and she made a dash for her engagement book, and began to scribble something in it. As she wrote she said to him over her shoulder, “Won’t Helen look just too lovely in mourning?”

What a woman! He gazed at her speechless. What would the incalculable creature say next—what do?

What she did was to move a stool near to his chair, and seat herself. What she said was, “Well—then—of course—that makes a difference. Let me see—yes—I have it—I’ll lend Stephen the money—lots of money; I can, you know, just as easy as not.”

“Lend Stephen the money!” Latham said dumb-foundedly.

“Oh—of course,” Angela added impatiently; “Stephen Pryde wouldn’t borrow money of me—of course not. That’s where you come in.”

“Oh! where I come in——”

“Yes, of course, don’t you see——”

“No, I certainly do not.”

“How stupid! It’s perfectly simple. I think a blind man would see it—if he was fair-to-middling smart. You are to lend him the money.”

“I!”

“Yes, stupid—you: my money.”

“Oh!”

“Listen—don’t sit there staring and just say, ‘I! Oh! Ah!’ as if you were trying to sing: ‘Do—re—mi—fa—sol—la.’ You are to manage Stephen.”

“Instead of handling Bransby,” Latham said with light sarcasm.

But Mrs. Hilary beamed on him approvingly. “Exactly.”

“It occurs to me,” Latham remarked softly, “that you intend me to renounce medicine for diplomacy.”

“They’re much the same thing—but—oh! I’ll manage it all really.”

“Yes—I inferred that. Now, please, the details. To begin at the beginning, you wish to endow Pryde with your fortune.”

“I wish to do nothing of the sort,” she said severely. “I am going to lend him part of it; or rather invest it in him. I shall get it all back a thousand times.”

“Good interest!”

“Oh—be quiet——”

Latham sat in smiling silence.

“You will do it? You must!”

“I begin to see. I am to lend Pryde a slice—shall we say?—of your fortune. Now, just that I may act intelligently, may I enquire how much?”

“That’s what you are to find out.”

“Oh! that’s what I am to find out——”

“Of course.”

“May I—dare I ask, what he wishes it for—or needs it—or is to have it?”

“To build aircraft. You ought to know that. I think you are dense to-day, Dr. Latham.”

“I think you are very charming—to-day, Mrs. Hilary.”

“And you will help me? Say you will. Say it now!”

“I am thinking——”

“Don’t think. Just promise.”

Latham was minded to tell her, “Some one must think,” but he refrained, and said instead, “We’ll talk it over at least, several times, if we may. Yes, I’ll come soon again and talk it over, if you’ll let me.”

She seemed quite satisfied at that. Probably she foresaw several tÊte-À-tÊte luncheons. Perhaps Latham did also.

He would have stayed to tea, but Angela did not ask him; and at last he got up slowly. Even then she might ask him, he thought, but she did not.

But she gave him a deep red rose—at his request.

Just as he was going he turned back to say, “I do know, of course, that Pryde is obsessed about aviation, and that Bransby will have none of it—and, between you and me, I think that Bransby is wrong—but why do you care? Are you interested in the air?”

“Good gracious, no. I love the earth—and indoors for choice. Give me a good rocking-chair. I’d rather have that than the best horse that ever was driven or ridden, though I like horses too. I’m just sheer sorry for Stephen Pryde. I like him. And I’d just love to help him. He’ll succeed too, I think; but that’s not the point. I want him to have his own way. He never has—in anything. Only think, how horrid, never to have your own way.”

“Much you know about it.”

She ignored that. Angela was terribly in earnest. “He is very intense. He is strong too. And with all his strength he has desired two things intensely. Hugh, his own brother, has thwarted him in one; Richard Bransby in the other. One we can’t give him. The other we can. And we are going to—you and I.” She held out her hand in “good-by,” but Latham knew she meant it even more in compact.

He was thoughtful all his way back to Deep Dale, and silent at dinner.

Undressing for sleep—if sleep came—he looked at his red rose with an odd rueful smile, and put it carefully in water.

At that moment Angela Hilary laughed softly as she let her dark hair fall free to the white hem of her nightgown. Then she threw a kiss to herself in the mirror.

The first thing Latham saw the next morning when he woke was a deep crimson rose. He lay very still for a long time watching it.