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 out. The vista of his neat mahogany counters and brass grills did not interest him. He was rereading, not for the first time, a letter he held in his hand. A hand-written letter, the envelope of which had been marked "Private and confidential."

He had had Henry's letter for some time, but this new scrape of Tom's had reminded him of it. He had never cared much for Henry Dowling; old Lucius, with his love for the West, his Rabelaisian jokes, his roistering friends and his disregard of anything under a twenty dollar note as a medium of circulation, had always appealed to him. There had been something rather splendid about him. But he was just, too. He and Henry might have been cut out of the same cloth. Just so, given the same situation, would he have acted. But the fact did not alter his distaste for the letter and the writer.

And now the girl was sitting alone in that hotel, with the heat and the flies, and the stale odors of bad cooking, and Tom McNair was in jail. Perhaps he'd better ask Jennie to go in and see her. But no—better keep the women out of this.

He had an uneasy conviction that the whole matter was somehow not quite respectable.

Then he looked up and saw Kay in the doorway. The feeling could not live before that vision of her, young and steady-eyed and certainly not abased. Oh, certainly not abased. There was a look of her grandfather about her, too. Odd that he had never noticed the resemblance before.

Mr. Tulloss, who made the common masculine mistake of considering that clear eyes and youth were essentially virginal qualities, felt that there had been an essential indecency in his previous thoughts of her, and by way of apology made his greeting unexpectedly warm.

"Well, well!" he exclaimed. "Haven't you been a long time coming in to see me?"

"I didn't think you would care to see me," she said simply.

He passed over that, put her in a chair, drew the shade