“Now, Harriet, what’s the matter?  You said in your note that you wanted to see me about something important.  What is it?”

Harriet stopped abruptly and looked rather timidly at Meyers.  She had been trying in vain to lead up to the point of asking her favor, and here her companion had given her the very opportunity she required.

Yet Harriet hesitated, and the laughter died away on her lips.  She knew she was doing a very wrong thing in asking this young man to lend her money.  But Harriet had been spoiled by too much admiration and she had had no mother’s influence in the four years of her life when she most needed it.  She was determined not to ask her father’s help, and she knew of no one else to whom she could appeal.

“I am not feeling very well, Charlie,” Harriet answered queerly, turning a little pale and trying to summon her courage.

“You’ve been entertaining too much company!” Charlie Meyers exclaimed.  “I don’t think much of that set of ‘Automobile Girls’ you have staying with you.  They are good-looking enough, but they are kind of standoffish and superior.”

“No, indeed; I am not having too much company,” Harriet returned indignantly, forgetting she must not let herself grow angry with her ill-bred friend.  “I am perfectly devoted to every one of the ’Automobile Girls,’ and Ruth Stuart is my first cousin.”

Harriet and Charlie were both silent for a little while after this unfortunate beginning to their conversation, for Harriet did not know exactly how to go on.

“I am worried,” she began again, after a slight pause in which she counted the trees along the road to see how fast their car was running.  “I am worried because I am in a great deal of trouble.”

“You haven’t been getting engaged, have you, Harriet?” asked the young man anxiously.  “If you want to break it off, just leave matters to me.”

Harriet laughed in spite of herself.  It seemed so perfectly absurd to her to be expected to leave a matter as important to her happiness as her engagement to a person like Charlie Meyers to settle.

Charlie Meyers was twenty-two years of age.  He had refused to go to college and had never even finished high school.  His father had died when he was a child, leaving him to the care of a stepmother who had little affection for him.  At the age of twenty-one the boy came into control of his immense fortune.  So it was not remarkable that Charlie Meyers, who had almost no education, no home influence and a vast sum of money at his disposal, thought himself of tremendous importance without making any effort to prove himself so.

“No, I am not engaged, Charlie,” Harriet answered frankly.  “But I do want you to do me a favor, and I wonder if you will do it?”

The young man flushed.  His red face grew redder still.  What was Harriet going to ask him?  He began to feel suspicious.

Now this rich young man had a peculiarity of which Harriet had not dreamed, or she would never have dared to ask him for a loan.  He was very stingy, and he had an abnormal fear that people were going to try to make use of him.