window, where a man's shadow fell on the blind.

"Do you happen to remember," he asked her, "our being taken, as youngsters, to see 'Box and Cox.' Exit Box, enter Cox? It was a rattling good play. I can laugh now at the joke of it.”

"Morry Fordham," she remonstrated, "you are just as feather-brained, to-night, as you were when you were fourteen. What made you think of 'Box and Cox' now?"

"What, indeed?" he answered, adding under his breath: "Devilish close shave, that! Ta-ta, Denny, my boy!"

CHAPTER XVI

IN

A CONTEST

N the Fannings' library a single lamp burned under a pale-green shade. The dim twilight seemed portentous. There might have been a death in the house, thought Denys. When Margery came in, with his card crumpled in her hand, her dress struck him as darker and severer than her wont, while her face looked pallid in the gloom. Near the door, silent, she stood waiting for him to address her.

Though his resolve had brought him immense relief, yet the moment of confession was none the less awful. His heart beat so that he could not speak. At last she said in a tremulous voice:

"You have come to explain to me."

"Yes," he answered heavily. “Yes.”

She advanced a little, clenching her slender hands.

"It is something terrible," she breathed; "something overwhelming!"

Tense, expectant, she seemed to fall upon the seat of a comfortless Italian chair.

"It is something you could n't guess, something I don't know how to tell you." Denys fought for an instant's respite.

"I have guessed that it is tragedy,” the girl said, still in the same restrained tones.

If it had been tragedy, he felt that he could have borne it better. It was the pettiness of the complication that overmastered him.

“Yes, if deceit is tragic, and the betrayal of friendship," he answered at last. "Margery, there is no Maurus Tolna.”

She sprang to her feet.

"He is dead?"

"No; the singer, the man you know, lives and thrives. But he is not an Hungarian. He is American. His real name is Morris Fordham."

She stared at him.

"But I don't understand," she stammered. "You have told me his story-HungaryTolna Castle-his patriotism-his hermit life?"

"All invention."

She sank back into her chair, still staring at him.

Now that he was confessing what he had felt that he would rather die than reveal, he chose the bluntest words, with a sort of pleasure in his own anguish as he saw himself sink lower and lower in her contempt. Baldly he told her of his discovery of Maurice, of his patient training, of the boy's slangy commonplaceness, of his own device to flood this stolid dullness with the limelight of romance.

"Just a fraud on the public to get money, Margery."

Indignation lifted her to her feet.

"And what of me-when you spent hours, days, glorifying him to me?"

He groaned aloud.

"God forgive me! I never thought that it could touch you."

Her quiet sentence stung: "No, you never thought."

He lowered his face in his hands.

Presently she spoke again, with a distinct bitterness.

"Some days ago, you gave me to understand that this spotless knight, this honest gentleman, had done me the honor to seek my hand, and would wait upon us at once to plead his cause. Was that an essential part of your

fraud to get money?"

It did not occur to him that this was not the

plaint of a broken heart. He raised a haggard face.

"There, at least, I was sincere, Miss Fanning. I was sure that he loved you."

Her tone was even more contemptuous.

66

Till you took the decent trouble to inquire, and found that the cheater was cheated." "I never doubted-" he stammered. "Then you did ask him? You did report that I adored him?" she cried sharply, as if she were but now assured. "You did thrust me upon him, till to escape me he has fled. Oh, I can guess it all!"

He made no attempt to defend himself. After a moment, marshaling her grievances, she swept on:

"You forced me on him. And you called yourself my friend!"

He looked up now.

"It was indefensible, Miss Fanning. My only excuse is that I love you."

From her "You!" he winced as from a whip; but, offender as he acknowledged himself, her tone stung him out of his meek submission to her taunts.

"Yes, I. I loved you from the first moment I saw you, last summer. I almost told