“Coming home?” she questioned with not much interest.  “Where are you going?”

“To Japan on a little business trip.  One of the big houses wants to get some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is living in a backwoods village there for his health—­and his liberty.  None of their own men can afford time to go.  And I got the chance, a very good one for me—­but I tire you.”

“No; oh, no,” said Miss Knowles politely.  “You are very interesting.”

“Then you shouldn’t fidget and yawn.  You lay yourself open to misinterpretation.  To continue:  a very great chance for me.  The firm is a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me to be heard of in connection with it.”

“Some nasty scandal, of course.”

“Not exactly.  It is the Drewitt case.  I wonder if you heard anything about it.”

“For three months after the thing happened,” she assured him with a flattering accession of interest, “I heard nothing about anything else.  Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know.  I heard that there was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement.  And now you’re going to interview the man!  And you’re going to Japan!  Oh, the colossal luck of some people!  You will write to me—­won’t you?—­as soon as you see him, and tell me all about him.  How he looks, what he says, how he justifies himself.  O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely write to me?”

“Naturally,” said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation; happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very unsatisfying but charming interlocutor.  “I always do.  Sometimes when your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of going away so that I might write to you.  Perhaps I could write more convincingly than I can talk.”  A cheering condition of things for a lawyer, he reflected.

“But this is a different and much more particular thing,” she insisted with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious.  “I have a sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father.  I shall make a list of questions and you will answer them fully, won’t you?  Then I shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the Drewitt affair.  When do you start?”

“To-morrow morning.  I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then,” doggedly, “then I’m coming home to be married.  I came in to tell you.”

“And if I don’t quite believe you?”

“I shall postpone the ceremony.  Shall we say indefinitely, some time in the summer?”

“Not even then.  Never, I think.  That troublesome girl is beginning—­she feels that she ought to tell you—­”

“That there is another ’another’?”

“Yes, I fear so.”

“Who will be in town for the next three months?”

“Again, I fear so.”