“Money!” Billy threw back the words in surprise, half contemptuous, “Oh, Lord, no, it’s not money!  I haven’t much of it now, but I’m going to make a bunch of the stuff—­if I want to.”  He spoke with naive and amazing confidence which somehow struck astounded belief into the listener.  “There’s enough of it there, waiting to be made—­no, it’s not money—­though perhaps one might well think it ought to be.  I suppose my work might strike a girl as hard for her,” he went on, considering aloud these problems of existence, “for it’s here to-day and there to-morrow—­now doing a building in a roaring city and now damming up some reservoir deep in the mountains—­but it always seemed to me that the girl who would like me would like that, too.  It’s seeing so much of life—­and such real life!  Oh, no,” he said, and though a trace of doubt had struck into his voice, “that in itself wouldn’t be what I’d call impossible—­not for the right girl.”

“But your work—­would it always be in America?” said Lady Claire.

“Oh, always.  It has to be, of course.”

“Oh....  And—­and—­you—­have to have—­that work?”

“Why, of course, I have to have it!” Billy was bewildered, but entirely positive.  “That’s my work—­the thing I’m made to do. I couldn’t earn my salt selling apartment houses.”

“Oh, no, no,” the girl hurriedly agreed.

A long, long silence followed, a silence in which he was entirely oblivious to her imaginings.  The moonlight lay heavy as dreams about them; her thoughts went darting to and fro like fluttering swallows....  She felt herself a stranger to herself....  She looked up at him with a sudden deer-like lift of her head, and then looked swiftly away.

“Don’t go,” she said in a quick, low voice.  “Don’t go—­yet.  Even things that look impossible—­can be made to come right.”

He understood that she was pleading with him, partly for the sake of her own chance with Falconer, but the sympathy flicked him on the raw.  He was sorry for her, sorry for the queer, strained look in her face, sorry for the voice so full of feeling, but he couldn’t do anything to help her.

In silence he shook his head and was astounded at the look of sudden proud anger she darted at him.

“You’re a mighty real friend to take such an interest in my luck,” he said quickly, with warm liking in his voice, “and I only wish you could play fairy godmother and give me my wish—­but you can’t, Lady Claire, and apparently she won’t, and that is the end of the matter.  I have to take off my hat to the Better Man.”

Lady Claire did not gasp or stammer or question.  She did none of the dismayedly enlightening things into which a lesser poise might have tottered.  After an inconsiderable moment of silence she merely uttered her familiar, “Oh!” and uttered it in a voice in which so many things were blended that their elements could hardly be perceived.