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Rh Because he knows that he isn't welcomed here by any one but you and Gene! He'll probably be welcomed as your guest by the Landises; they don't know him as I do!"

"You're only a child." Cissie smoothed her crêpe draperies complacently. "What could you know of a man of the world like Farley?"

"I know that he has led Gene into all the trouble he was ever in, and poor Julian, too! That's enough for me!" Nan poured herself a cup of the cold coffee. "How you can be so stupid, Cissie!—"

But Cissie had trailed from the room, and her younger sister was left to her own thoughts.

In the smoking-room back of the library Richard Lorne was closeted with Samuel Titheredge of Titheredge, Gore & Wells, attorneys and counselors-at-law.

Samuel was as long and lean and lantern-jawed as Lorne was short and stout and round-faced; and the two had been friends since their university days thirty years before. It was with the freedom, then, of absolute camaraderie that the lawyer advised his client.

"Dick, don't be an ass! Go to the authorities with what, I should like to know? Sad as the affair is, I can't see that there is anything strange about it. It isn't at all unusual for two members of one family to die of different causes within a month of each other. Buck up, and if there is anything left in your private cellar take a swig of it before you go to bed. Why, man, there isn't even a coincidence in the affair! If you take such a cock-and-bull story to Headquarters, do you know what will happen? You'll get a lot of derisive notoriety that you're not looking for; and