“It’s quite possible that a young woman as much sought after and annoyed by fortune hunters, may have elected to sail incognita.  It can be done, you know.  In fact, it has been done.”

George digested this in profound gloom.

“Then you don’t believe what I’m tellin’ you?”

“Not one-tenth of one iota of a belief.”

George betrayed in a rude, choleric grunt, his disgust to see his splendid fabrication, so painfully concocted for the delusion and discomfiture of P. Sybarite, threatening to collapse of sheer intrinsic flimsiness.  He had counted so confidently on the credulity of the little bookkeeper!  And Violet had supported his confidence with so much assurance!  Disgusting wasn’t the word for George’s emotions.

In desperation he grasped at one final, fugitive hope.

“All right,” he said sullenly:  “all right!  You don’t gotta believe me if you don’t wanta.  Only wait—­that’s all I ask—­wait!  You’ll see I’m right when she turns down your invite to-night.”

P. Sybarite smiled sunnily.  “So that is why you thought she wouldn’t go with us, is it?”

“You got me.”

“You thought she, if Marian Blessington, must necessarily be such a snob that she wouldn’t associate with poor devils like us, did you?”

“Wait.  You’ll see.”

“Well, it’s none of your business, George; but I don’t mind telling you, you’re wrong.  Quite wrong.  In the head, too, George.  I’ve already asked Miss Lessing, and she has accepted.”

George’s eyes, protruding, glistened with poignant surprise.

“You ast her already?”

“That’s why I left you down the street.  I dropped into Blessington’s for the sole purpose of asking her.”

“And she fell for it?”

“She accepted my invitation—­yes.”

After a long pause George ground his cigarette beneath his heel, and rose.

“In wrong, as usual,” he admitted with winning simplicity.  “I never did guess anythin’ right the first time.  Only—­you just grab this from me:  maybe she’s willin’ to run the risk of bein’ seen with us, but that ain’t sayin’ she’s anybody but Marian Blessington.”

“You really think it likely that Miss Blessington, hiding from her guardian and anxious to escape detection, would take a job at the glove counter of her own store, where everybody must know her by sight—­where her guardian, Shaynon himself, couldn’t fail to see her at least twice a day, as he enters and leaves the building?”

Staggered, Bross recovered quickly.

“That’s just her cuteness.  She doped it out the safest place for her would be the last place he’d look for her!”

“And you really think that she, accustomed to every luxury that money can buy, would voluntarily come down to living here, at six dollars a week, and clerking in a department store—­simply because, according to the papers, she’s opposed to a marriage that she can’t be forced to contract in a free country like this?”