“Well, let’s wish them happiness with all our hearts,” he said, and added a little wistfully, “If it could only come by wishing.”

“Ah, if it could!” was Gerty’s plaintive echo; then her voice dropped into a sigh of perplexity, and she leaned toward him in a flattering confidential manner.  “Do you know there are some men who are cads only in their relations to women,” she observed; “leave out that element from their make-up and they’re all round first-rate fellows.”

“I dare say you’re right,” he answered, and thought of Perry Bridewell, “but why do you select this instant,” he added humorously, “to formulate your philosophy of sex?”

Her earnestness fled and she leaned back in her chair laughing.  “Oh, I don’t know—­perhaps—­because one doesn’t like to lose an aphorism even if it pops into one’s head at the wrong time.”

Then as he rose to go she pressed his hand with a grip that was almost boyish.  “How I wish you liked me half as much as I like you,” she said.

“I do—­I shall always,” he responded in his whimsical manner.  “There’s absolutely no limit to my liking—­only I know it would be the surest way to bore you to death.”

She laughed a little wearily.  “It would be so nice to be really liked,” she pursued.  “Nobody likes me.  A good many have loved me in one way or another, but I want to be just liked.”

He saw the pathetic little frown gather between her brows, and in spite of the pain in his own heart, he felt a profound and pitiful sympathy.  “Well, we’ll make a compact upon it,” he declared, holding her hand for an instant in his hearty grasp.  “I promise to like you until you tell me frankly that you’re bored.”

The eager child quality he seldom saw was in her look and she was about to make some impulsive answer to his words, when there was the sound of a heavy step outside the door and they heard the next instant Perry’s hilarious voice.

“Well, I’m jolly glad you kept him, Gerty, but, by Jove, I wonder how you hit it off.  He’s not your sort, you know.”

The child quality vanished instantly from her face, and Adams watched the mocking insolence creep back upon her lips.

“On the other hand we’re perfectly agreed,” she said.  “I don’t confine my admiration to your type, you know.”

“You don’t, eh?  Well, that’s a good joke!” exclaimed Perry, with a break into his not unpleasant, though sensual laugh.  As he stood, squaring his handsome chest, in the centre of the room, Adams felt that the mere animal splendour of the man had never been more impressive.

“I find to my great pleasure that Mrs. Bridewell and I are very good friends,” remarked Adams, after a moment in which he had taken in Perry’s full magnificence with his humorous short-sighted gaze, “and she has promised on the strength of it to extend to me the favour of her protection.  No, I can’t stay now,” he added, in answer to Perry’s protestations.  “I’ll see you again to-morrow—­there’s really not the faintest need to hurry.”