“I presume you’re here to see me on business?” Mr. Spragg enquired, rising from his chair with a glance that seemed to ask his daughter’s silence.

“Why, yes.  Senator,” rejoined Moffatt, who was given, in playful moments, to the bestowal of titles high-sounding.  “At least I’m here to ask you a little question that may lead to business.”

Mr. Spragg crossed the office and held open the door.  “Step this way, please,” he said, guiding Moffatt out before him, though the latter hung back to exclaim:  “No family secrets, Mrs. Marvell—­anybody can turn the fierce white light on me!”

With the closing of the door Undine’s thoughts turned back to her own preoccupations.  It had not struck her as incongruous that Moffatt should have business dealings with her father:  she was even a little surprised that Mr. Spragg should still treat him so coldly.  But she had no time to give to such considerations.  Her own difficulties were too importunately present to her.  She moved restlessly about the office, listening to the rise and fall of the two voices on the other side of the partition without once wondering what they were discussing.

What should she say to her father when he came back—­what argument was most likely to prevail with him?  If he really had no money to give her she was imprisoned fast—­Van Degen was lost to her, and the old life must go on interminably...In her nervous pacings she paused before the blotched looking-glass that hung in a corner of the office under a steel engraving of Daniel Webster.  Even that defective surface could not disfigure her, and she drew fresh hope from the sight of her beauty.  Her few weeks of ill-health had given her cheeks a subtler curve and deepened the shadows beneath her eyes, and she was handsomer than before her marriage.  No, Van Degen was not lost to her even!  From narrowed lids to parted lips her face was swept by a smile like retracted sunlight.  He was not lost to her while she could smile like that!  Besides, even if her father had no money, there were always mysterious ways of “raising” it—­in the old Apex days he had often boasted of such feats.  As the hope rose her eyes widened trustfully, and this time the smile that flowed up to them was as limpid as a child’s.  That was the was her father liked her to look at him...

The door opened, and she heard Mr. Spragg say behind her:  “No, sir, I won’t—­that’s final.”

He came in alone, with a brooding face, and lowered himself heavily into his chair.  It was plain that the talk between the two men had had an abrupt ending.  Undine looked at her father with a passing flicker of curiosity.  Certainly it was an odd coincidence that Moffatt should have called while she was there...

“What did he want?” she asked, glancing back toward the door.

Mr. Spragg mumbled his invisible toothpick.  “Oh, just another of his wild-cat schemes—­some real-estate deal he’s in.”