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 till I got back with help; and if I didn't ever get back, what would be the difference?"

"You'd have known it for a minute, at any rate, if you were killed the next," explained Dads.

"Known what?"

"That he was wrong about you."

"But I did know it anyway. Heavens, I'd been telling him that for three months."

"He wanted you to know that he knew it, at last."

"Yes," said Joan Daisy, nodding, for of course she had realized this and was only talking it over. "He wanted the world to know, too, when he was wrong as much as when he thought he was right. I stood by him when he telephoned the police, and he certainly came out and said he'd been wrong," she related; and Dads, watching, saw deep color spread from her forehead to her throat. "He surely came through against himself—and for Ket and me. . . . It would have been a queer wind-up for the Clarke family, wouldn't it, Dads?"

"What would?" he inquired, aware that she had been thinking so intently that she had not noticed that she had ceased speaking to him.

"Oh, if that car had turned over a little harder or the bullets had got us. I was thinking of a rotogravure section printing a picture of a flivver upside down in a frozen corn field for the finish of the Clarke family—after Queen Anne's war and General Knox's staff and Antietam."

"Seen him to-day?" ventured Dads.

"No. He telephoned about the man I shot—Baretta," answered Joan Daisy, carefully wiping a cup. "I asked him to; I wanted to know."

"That," said Dads, firmly grasping her arm, "that's nothing to think of."

"I'll think of it, Dads!" she said, raising her head. "I