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320 The rattle became articulate: "I've lost it! It's gone!"

"What have you lost?"

"N-nothing, sir. That is—I mean to say—my fountain pen."

"The way you take it, I should say you'd lost your head," Stanistreet commented. "You must have dropped the thing somewhere. Look about, see if you can't find it."

Thus admonished, the secretary began to search the floor with frantic glances, and as the footman ushered in Cecelia Brooke, Lanyard saw the young man dart forward and retrieve the pen with a start of relief wellnigh as unmanning as the shock of loss had seemed.

With that Lanyard's interest in the fellow waned; he was too poor a thing to consider seriously; while here was one who compelled anew, as ever when they met, the homage of sincere and marvelling admiration.

Yet another of those miracles of feminine adaptability and makeshift had brought the girl to this meeting in the guise of one who had never known a broken night or an hour's care, with a look of such fresh tranquility that it seemed hardly possible she could be one and the same with that wilted little woman whom Lanyard had left in the gray dawn at the entrance to the Hotel Knickerbocker. A tailored suit, necessarily borrowed plumage, became her so completely that it was difficult to believe it not her own. Her eyes were calm and sweet with candour; her colour was a clear and artless glow; the hand she offered the Briton was tremorless.

"Colonel Stanistreet?"