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 with a pretended interest, touched by Don's gratitude, but nervously afraid of this expression of it. Don said, out of the silence: "I wish Miss Morris . . . wasn't a woman."

"Wasn't a"

"So that she could take it. You and she—you're the best friends I've had. She doesn't seem very happy, alone that way." Pittsey looked at him with a quizzical lift of the eyebrow; but he went on innocently: "It's pretty hard for a girl. I'd give anything to be able to help her the way you did me. We get on so well together, too. . . . Funny thing—to-night—she thought I didn't like her."

He spoke as if he were thinking aloud; and Pittsey, as if ashamed of overhearing him, checked him with: "Perhaps Bert 'll know someone—to come in with you."

As they turned up the old and broken brownstone steps that mounted from the street to the front door of their lodgings, Don said: "For that matter—now that I'm getting ten a week—we could keep the place for you till you come back." And Walter was still remonstrating against this folly, when they entered the "dining-room" and were confronted by Conroy, soiled and dishevelled, eating at the table.

  had run away from home; that was evident at once from the sulky and defiant way in which he received 