Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall and rather handsome?"

"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was humorously resigned to his mother's[p 27] habit of deserting the general for the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.

[p 27]

"How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her uniform—and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.

Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.

"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"

He threw back his head to meet her gaze.

"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these investigations going to help you?"

Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You are afraid I am going to lose my place."[p 28]

[p 28]

She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever wanted to see you in!"

"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never have been content as anything but a working-man."

"How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as any statesman or lawyer."

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