For this cause he had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation.  The unexplained telephone call decided him, however.  He would go and see Elinor and have the ordeal over with.

But as a preliminary he dined that evening with Ormsby at the Camelot Club, and over the coffee had it out with him.

“I am going out to see Miss Brentwood to-night,” he announced abruptly.  “Have you any objection?”

The millionaire gave him the shrewdest of over-looks, ending with a deep-rumbling laugh.

“Kent, you are the queerest lot I have ever discovered, and that is saying a good bit.  Why, in the name of all the proprieties, should I object?”

“Your right is unchallenged,” Kent admitted.

“Is it?  Better ask Miss Brentwood about that.  She might say it isn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kent, dry-tongued.

“Don’t you?  Perhaps I’d better explain:  she might find it a little difficult.  You have been laboring under the impression that we are engaged, haven’t you?”

“Laboring under the—­why, good heavens, man! it’s in everybody’s mouth!”

“Curious, isn’t it, how such things get about,” commented the player of long suits.  “How do you suppose they get started?”

“I don’t suppose anything about it, so far as we two are concerned; I have your own word for it.  You said you were the man in possession.”

Ormsby laughed again.

“You are something of a bluffer yourself, David.  Did you let my little stagger scare you out?”

David Kent pushed his chair back from the table and nailed Ormsby with a look that would have made a younger man betray himself.

“Do you mean to tell me that there is no engagement between you and Miss Brentwood?”

“Just that.”  Ormsby put all the nonchalance he could muster into the laconic reply, but he was anticipating the sequent demand which came like a shot out of a gun.

“And there never has been?”

Ormsby grinned.

“When you are digging a well and have found your stream of water, it’s folly to go deeper, David.  Can’t you let ‘good enough’ alone?”

Kent turned it over in his mind, frowning thoughtfully into his coffee-cup.  When he spoke it was out of the mid-heart of manliness.

“I wish you would tell me one thing, Ormsby.  Am I responsible for—­for the present state of affairs?”

Ormsby stretched the truth a little; partly for Elinor’s sake; more, perhaps, for Kent’s.

“You have done nothing that an honorable rival—­and incidentally a good friend of mine—­might not do.  Therefore you are not responsible.”

“That is putting it very diplomatically,” Kent mused.  “I am afraid it does not exonerate me wholly.”

“Yes, it does.  But it doesn’t put me out of the running, you understand.  I’m ‘forninst’ you yet; rather more stubbornly than before, I fancy.”