“I’m afraid I don’t understand.  How do you know Miss Lessing won’t go?  Did she tell you so?”

“Not what you might call exactly, but she won’t all right,” George returned with confidence.  “There ain’t one chance in a hundred I’m in wrong.”

“In wrong?  How?”

“About her bein’ who she is.”

P. Sybarite subjected the open, naif countenance of the shipping clerk to a prolonged and doubting scrutiny.

“No, I ain’t crazy in the head, neither,” George asseverated with some heat.  “I suspicioned somethin’ was queer about that girl right along, but now I know it.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Ah, it ain’t nothin’ against her!  You don’t have to scorch your collar. She’s all right.  Only—­she ’s in bad.  I don’t s’pose you seen the evenin’ paper?”

“No.”

“Well, I picked up the Joinal down to Clancey’s—­this is it.”  With an effective flourish, George drew the sheet from his coat pocket and unfolded its still damp and pungent pages.  “And soon’s I seen that,” he added, indicating a smudged halftone, “I begun to wise up to that little girl.  It’s sure some shame about her, all right, all right.”

Taking the paper, P. Sybarite examined with perplexity a portrait labelled “Marian Blessington.”  Whatever its original aspect, the coarse mesh of the reproducing process had blurred it to a vague presentment of the head and shoulders of almost any young woman with fair hair and regular features:  only a certain, almost indefinable individuality in the pose of the head remotely suggested Molly Lessing.

In a further endeavour to fathom his meaning, the little bookkeeper conned carefully the legend attached to the putative likeness: 

  MARIAN BLESSINGTON

only daughter of the late Nathaniel Blessington, millionaire founder of the great Blessington chain of department stores.  Although much sought after on account of the immense property into control of which she is to come on her twenty-fifth birthday, Miss Blessington contrived to escape matrimonial entanglement until last January, when Brian Shaynon, her guardian and executor of the Blessington estate, gave out the announcement of her engagement to his son, Bayard Shaynon.  This engagement was whispered to be distasteful to the young woman, who is noted for her independent and spirited nature; and it is now persistently being rumoured that she had demonstrated her disapproval by disappearing mysteriously from the knowledge of her guardian.  It is said that nothing has been known of her whereabouts since about the 1st of March, when she left her home in the Shaynon mansion on Fifth Avenue, ostensibly for a shopping tour.  This was flatly contradicted this morning by Brian Shaynon, who in an interview with a reporter for the EVENING JOURNAL declared that his ward sailed for Europe February 28th on the Mauretania, and has since been in constant communication with her betrothed and his family.  He also denied having employed detectives to locate his ward.  The sailing list of the Mauretania fails to give the name of Miss Blessington on the date named by Mr. Shaynon.

Refolding the paper, P. Sybarite returned it without comment.