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It would have touched a harder heart than her loose friend’s to note the final flush of clairvoyance witnessing this assertion and under which her eyes shone as with the rush of quick tears. He stared at her, and at what this did for the deep charm of her prettiness, as in almost witless admiration. “But can’t you–lovely as you are, you beautiful thing!–speak for yourself?”

“Do you mean can’t I tell the lies? No, then, I can’t–and I wouldn’t if I could. I don’t lie myself, you know–as it happens; and it could represent to him then about the only thing, the only bad one, I don’t do. I did–‘lovely as I am’!–have my regular time; I wasn’t so hideous that I couldn’t! Besides, do you imagine he’d come and ask me?”

“Gad, I wish he would, Julia!” said Mr. Pitman, with his kind eyes on her.

“Well then, I’d tell him!” And she held her head again high. “But he won’t.”

It fairly distressed her companion. “Doesn’t he want, then, to know–?”

“He wants not to know. He wants to be told without asking–told, I mean, that each of the stories, those that have come to him, is a fraud and a libel. Qui s’excuse s’accuse, don’t they say?–so that do you see me breaking out to him, unprovoked, with four or five what-do-you-call-’ems, the things mother used to have to prove in court, a set of neat little ‘alibis’ in a row? How can I get hold of so many precious gentlemen, to turn them on? How can they want everything fished up?”

She paused for her climax, in the intensity of these considerations; which gave Mr. Pitman a chance to express his honest faith. “Why, my sweet child, they’d be just glad–!”

It determined in her loveliness almost a sudden glare. “Glad to swear they never had anything to do with such a creature? Then I’d be glad to swear they had lots!”

His persuasive smile, though confessing to bewilderment, insisted. “Why, my love, they’ve got to swear either one thing or the other.”

“They’ve got to keep out of the way–that’s their view of it, I guess,” said Julia. “Where are they, please–now that they may be wanted? If you’d like to hunt them up for me you’re very welcome.” With which, for the moment, over the difficult case, they faced each other helplessly enough. And she added to it now the sharpest ache of her despair. “He knows about Murray Brush. The others”–and her pretty white-gloved hands and charming pink shoulders gave them up–“may go hang!”

“Murray Brush–?” It had opened Mr. Pitman’s eyes.

“Yes–yes; I do mind him.”

“Then what’s the matter with his at least rallying–?”

“The matter is that, being ashamed of himself, as he well might, he left the country as soon as he could and has stayed away. The matter is that he’s in Paris or somewhere, and that if you expect him to come home for me–!” She had already dropped, however, as at Mr. Pitman’s look.

“Why, you foolish thing, Murray Brush is in New York!” It had quite brightened him up.

“He has come back–?”

“Why, sure! I saw him–when was it? Tuesday!–on the Jersey boat.” Mr. Pitman rejoiced in his news. “He’s your man!”

Julia too had been affected by it; it had brought, in a rich wave, her hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. “He was!”

“Then get hold of him, and–if he’s a gentleman–he’ll prove for you, to the hilt, that he wasn’t.”

It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater strangeness yet. “He isn’t a gentleman.”

“Ah, lordy, lordy!” Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it but only into the vague. “Oh, then, if he’s a pig–!”

“You see there are only a few gentlemen–not enough to go round–and that makes them count so!” It had thrust the girl herself, for that matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose he had no time to judge–aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since he mightn’t perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving surface of their question. It fell upon Julia’s face, fell with the sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her for all it immediately assumed.