She had fancied her avowal of loneliness might call forth some sentimental phrase; but though Moffatt was clearly pleased to be with her she saw that she was not the centre of his thoughts, and the discovery irritated her.

“I don’t suppose you’ve known what it is to be lonely since you’ve been in Europe?” she continued as she held out his tea-cup.

“Oh,” he said jocosely, “I don’t always go round with a guide”; and she rejoined on the same note:  “Then perhaps I shall see something of you.”

“Why, there’s nothing would suit me better; but the fact is, I’m probably sailing next week.”

“Oh, are you?  I’m sorry.”  There was nothing feigned in her regret.

“Anything I can do for you across the pond?”

She hesitated.  “There’s something you can do for me right off.”

He looked at her more attentively, as if his practised eve had passed through the surface of her beauty to what might be going on behind it.  “Do you want my blessing again?” he asked with sudden irony.

Undine opened her eyes with a trustful look.  “Yes—­I do.”

“Well—­I’ll be damned!” said Moffatt gaily.

“You’ve always been so awfully nice,” she began; and he leaned back, grasping both sides of the chair-back, and shaking it a little with his laugh.

He kept the same attitude while she proceeded to unfold her case, listening to her with the air of sober concentration that his frivolous face took on at any serious demand on his attention.  When she had ended he kept the same look during an interval of silent pondering.  “Is it the fellow who was over at Nice with you that day?”

She looked at him with surprise.  “How did you know?”

“Why, I liked his looks,” said Moffatt simply.  He got up and strolled toward the window.  On the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her.  He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language.  “Say—­” he began:  it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back.

“Then you think if you had the cash you could fix it up all right with the Pope?”

Her heart began to beat.  She remembered that he had once put a job in Ralph’s way, and had let her understand that he had done it partly for her sake.

“Well,” he continued, relapsing into hyperbole, “I wish I could send the old gentleman my cheque to-morrow morning:  but the fact is I’m high and dry.”  He looked at her with a sudden odd intensity.  “If I wasn’t, I dunno but what—­” The phrase was lost in his familiar whistle.  “That’s an awfully fetching way you do your hair,” he said.  It was a disappointment to Undine to hear that his affairs were not prospering, for she knew that in his world “pull” and solvency were closely related, and that such support as she had hoped he might give her would be contingent on his own situation.  But she had again a fleeting sense of his mysterious power of accomplishing things in the teeth of adversity; and she answered:  “What I want is your advice.”