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“I can’t make out why it matters to you, one way or the other, nor why you should think it worth talking about,” the young man reasoned.

“Neither can I. It’s just a whim.”

“Certainly, if it will give you any pleasure, I’ll say nothing at the shop.”

“That’s charming of you, and I’m very grateful. I see now that this was why the spirit moved me to come up–to save them,” Mrs. Ryves went on. She added, moving away, that now she had saved them she must really go.

“To save them for what, if I mayn’t break the seals?” Baron asked.

“I don’t know–for a generous sacrifice.”

“Why should it be generous? What’s at stake?” Peter demanded, leaning against the doorpost as she stood on the landing.

“I don’t know what, but I feel as if something or other were in peril. Burn them up!” she exclaimed with shining eyes.

“Ah, you ask too much–I’m so curious about them!”

“Well, I won’t ask more than I ought, and I’m much obliged to you for your promise to be quiet. I trust to your discretion. Good-by.”

“You ought to REWARD my discretion,” said Baron, coming out to the landing.

She had partly descended the staircase and she stopped, leaning against the baluster and smiling up at him. “Surely you’ve had your reward in the honour of my visit.”

“That’s delightful as far as it goes. But what will you do for me if I burn the papers?”

Mrs. Ryves considered a moment. “Burn them first and you’ll see!”

On this she went rapidly downstairs, and Baron, to whom the answer appeared inadequate and the proposition indeed in that form grossly unfair, returned to his room. The vivacity of her interest in a question in which she had discoverably nothing at stake mystified, amused and, in addition, irresistibly charmed him. She was delicate, imaginative, inflammable, quick to feel, quick to act. He didn’t complain of it, it was the way he liked women to be;, but he was not impelled for the hour to commit the sealed packets to the flames. He dropped them again into their secret well, and after that he went out. He felt restless and excited; another day was lost for work– the dreadful job to be performed for Mr. Locket was still further off.

CHAPTER III.

Ten days after Mrs. Ryves’s visit he paid by appointment another call on the editor of the Promiscuous. He found him in the little wainscoted Chelsea house, which had to Peter’s sense the smoky brownness of an old pipebowl, surrounded with all the emblems of his office–a litter of papers, a hedge of encyclopaedias, a photographic gallery of popular contributors–and he promised at first to consume very few of the moments for which so many claims competed. It was Mr. Locket himself however who presently made the interview spacious, gave it air after discovering that poor Baron had come to tell him something more interesting than that he couldn’t after all patch up his tale. Peter had begun with this, had intimated respectfully that it was a case in which both practice and principle rebelled, and then, perceiving how little Mr. Locket was affected by his audacity, had felt weak and slightly silly, left with his heroism on his hands. He had armed himself for a struggle, but the Promiscuous didn’t even protest, and there would have been nothing for him but to go away with the prospect of never coming again had he not chanced to say abruptly, irrelevantly, as he got up from his chair:

“Do you happen to be at all interested in Sir Dominick Ferrand?”

Mr. Locket, who had also got up, looked over his glasses. “The late Sir Dominick?”

“The only one; you know the family’s extinct.”

Mr. Locket shot his young friend another sharp glance, a silent retort to the glibness of this information. “Very extinct indeed. I’m afraid the subject today would scarcely be regarded as attractive.”