Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/376

THE BETTER SORT "She's so ugly that she has to be rich—she couldn't afford it on less than five thousand a year. As it is, I could well see, she can afford anything—even such a nose. But she's funny and decent; sharp, but a really good sort. And they're not engaged."

"She told you so? Then there you are!"

"It all depends," Maud went on; "and you don't know where I am at all. I know what it depends on."

"Then there you are again! It's a mine of gold."

"Possibly, but not in your sense. She wouldn't give me the first word of an interview—it wasn't for that she received me. It was for something much better."

Well, Bight easily guessed. "For my job?"

"To see what can be done. She loathes his publicity."

The young man's face lighted. "She told you so?"

"She received me on purpose to tell me."

"Then why do you question my larks? What do you want more?"

"I want nothing—with what I have: nothing, I mean, but to help her. We made friends—I like her. And she likes me," said Maud Blandy.

"Like Mortimer Marshal, precisely."

"No, precisely not like Mortimer Marshal. I caught, on the spot, her idea—that was what took her. Her idea is that I can help her—help her to keep them quiet about Beadel: for which purpose I seem to have struck her as falling from the skies, just at the right moment, into her lap."

Howard Bight followed, yet lingered by the way. "To keep whom quiet?"

"Why, the beastly Papers—what we've been talking about. She wants him straight out of them—straight."

"She too?" Bight wondered. "Then she's in terror?" 364