“I want to see about a partnership arrangement,” Fred explained, finally.

Helen stirred in her seat.  “You mean that you want him to go in with us?...  What’s the reason?  He’s satisfied.”

Fred drew himself up.  “But I’m not!” he answered, decidedly.

She shrugged.  “We’ve had one experience...we’d better think twice before we make another break.”

“I’ve thought it all over,” he replied, pointedly.

She colored and flashed a sharp glance at him.  “I spoke to him about the premiums this morning...  He tells me he ordered them paid.”  “Yes ... direct to the companies...  That’s one of the reasons that made me decide to get things on a better working basis...  I’m tired of being an object of charity.”

She smiled coldly.  Well, Hilmer simply wouldn’t receive anyone now, and she herself didn’t see the reason for haste.  He ended by telling her the reason ... there was no other way out of the situation.

“Oh,” she drawled, when he had finished, “so getting rid of Brauer was too easy, after all!” She made no other comment, but he read her scornful glance.  “Any fool would have guessed that!” was what it implied.

Still, even with the fact of Brauer’s craftiness exposed, she could not be persuaded that the proposition was quite that urgent.

“You don’t?” he inquired, with growing irritation.  “Well, you’ve forgotten that check for some six hundred-odd dollars I wrote for Brauer the other day...  I presume you know it’s a felony to give out checks when there aren’t sufficient funds on deposit.”

She stared at him.  “That’s absurd!” she exclaimed.  “Brauer wouldn’t go that far!”

He quite agreed there, but he didn’t say so.  Instead, he insisted that anything was possible.  They argued the matter scornfully.  In the end he won.

“Well, I’ll try,” she announced, coldly.  “I’ll do my best...  But I’m sure he won’t see you.”

She left the room with an indefinable air of boredom.  He rose from his seat and began to pace up and down.  The whole situation had a suggestion of unreality.  In pleading with Helen for a chance to talk to Hilmer he had a sense of crossing swords with some intangible and sinister shadow; his wife seemed suddenly to have arrived at a state toward which she had been traveling all these last uncertain weeks ... fading, fading from the frame of his existence.  Was he growing hypersensitive or merely unreasonable?

Fifteen minutes passed ... a half hour...an hour.  Starratt stopped his restless movements and picked up the sprawling magazine...  Presently Helen came into the room.  He rose.

Her thin-lipped smile shaped itself with a tolerant geniality as she came toward him with complacent triumph.

“Well,” she began, easily, “I got a thousand dollars out of him.”

He went up close to her.  “A thousand...  I don’t quite understand.”