Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/412

THE BETTER SORT things to-night that she'll never tell again. To-night she'll be great."

Maud gaped almost wildly. "You want me, at such an hour, to call?"

"And send up your card with the word—oh, of course the right one!—on it."

"What do you suggest," Maud asked, "as the right one?"

"Well, 'The world wants you'—that usually does. I've seldom known it, even in deeper distress than is, after all, here supposable, to fail. Try it, at any rate."

The girl, strangely touched, intensely wondered. "Demand of her, you mean, to let me explain for her?"

"There you are. You catch on. Write that—if you like—'Let me explain.' She'll want to explain."

Maud wondered at him more—he had somehow so turned the tables on her. "But she doesn't. It's exactly what she doesn't; she never has. And that he, poor wretch, was always wanting to"

"Was precisely what made her hold off? I grant it." He had waked up. "But that was before she had killed him. Trust me, she'll chatter now."

This, for his companion, simply forced it out. "It wasn't she who killed him. That, my dear, you know."

"You mean it was I who did? Well then, my child, interview me." And, with his hands in his pockets and his idea apparently genuine, he smiled at her, by the grey river and under the high lamps, with an effect strange and suggestive. "That would be a go!"

"You mean"—she jumped at it—"you'll tell me what you know?"

"Yes, and even what I've done! But—if you'll take it so—for the Papers. Oh, for the Papers only!"

She stared. "You mean you want me to get it in?" 400