“Something of the sort.  I have led a queer kind of existence, full of useless purposes.  Fate has driven me into a corner where my odds and ends of knowledge are actually valuable.  Such accidents make men millionaires.”

“Useless purposes!” she repeated.  “I can hardly credit that.  One uses such a phrase to describe fussy people, alive with foolish activity.  Your worst enemy would not place you in such a category.”

“My worst enemy made the phrase effective at any rate, Miss Deane.”

“You mean that he ruined your career?”

“Well—­er—­yes.  I suppose that describes the position with fair accuracy.”

“Was he a very great scoundrel?”

“He was, and is.”

Jenks spoke with quiet bitterness.  The girl’s words had evoked a sudden flood of recollection.  For the moment he did not notice how he had been trapped into speaking of himself, nor did he see the quiet content on Iris’s face when she elicited the information that his chief foe was a man.  A certain tremulous hesitancy in her manner when she next spoke might have warned him, but his hungry soul caught only the warm sympathy of her words, which fell like rain on parched soil.

“You are tired,” she said.  “Won’t you smoke for a little while, and talk to me?”

He produced his pipe and tobacco, but he used his right hand awkwardly.  It was evident to her alert eyes that the torn quick on his injured finger was hurting him a great deal.  The exciting events of the morning had caused him temporarily to forget his wound, and the rapid coursing of the blood through the veins was now causing him agonized throbs.

With a cry of distress she sprang to her feet and insisted upon washing the wound.  Then she tenderly dressed it with a strip of linen well soaked in brandy, thinking the while, with a sudden rush of color to her face, that although he could suggest this remedy for her slight hurt, he gave no thought to his own serious injury.  Finally she pounced upon his pipe and tobacco-box.

“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed.  “I have often filled my father’s pipe for him.  First, you put the tobacco in loosely, taking care not to use any that is too finely powdered.  Then you pack the remainder quite tightly.  But I was nearly forgetting.  I haven’t blown, through the pipe to see if it is clean.”

She suited the action to the word, using much needless breath in the operation.

“That is a first-rate pipe,” she declared.  “My father always said that a straight stem, with the bowl at a right angle, was the correct shape.  You evidently agree with him.”

“Absolutely.”

“You will like my father when you meet him.  He is the very best man alive, I am sure.”

“You two are great friends, then?”

“Great friends!  He is the only friend I possess in the world.”

“What!  Is that quite accurate?”

“Oh, quite.  Of course, Mr. Jenks, I can never forget how much I owe to you.  I like you immensely, too, although you are so—­so gruff to me at times.  But—­but—­you see, my father and I have always been together.  I have neither brother nor sister, not even a cousin.  My dear mother died from some horrid fever when I was quite a little girl.  My father is everything to me.”