“Everything except his pleasant manner,” Van agreed.  “They have plenty of that of their own.”

She was lost for a moment in reflection.

“Poor Searle!  Poor Mr. Bostwick!”

Van drank the last of his coffee.

“Was Searle the only man you knew in all New York?”

She colored.  “Certainly not.  Of course not.  Why do you ask such a question?”

“I was trying to understand the situation, but I give it up.”  He looked in her eyes with mock gravity, and she colored.

She understood precisely what he meant—­the situation between herself and Bostwick, to whom, she feared, she had half confessed herself engaged.  She started three times to make a reply, but halted each answer for a better.

“You don’t like Mr. Bostwick,” she finally observed.

Van told her gravely:  “I like him like the old woman kept tavern.”

She could not entirely repress a smile.

“And how did she keep it—­the tavern?”

“Like hell,” said Van.  He rose to go, adding; “You like him about that way yourself—­since yesterday.”

Her eyes had been sparkling, but now they snapped.

“Why—­how can you speak so rudely?  You know that isn’t true!  You know I like—­admire Mr. Bost——­ You haven’t any right to say a thing like that—­no matter what you may have done for me!”

She too had risen.  She faced him glowingly.

He suddenly took both her hands and held them in a firm, warm clasp from which there could be no escape.

“Beth,” he said audaciously, “you are never going to marry that man.”

She was struggling vainly to be free.  Her face was crimson.

“Let me go!” she demanded.  “Mr. Van—­you let me go!  I don’t see how you dare to say a thing like that.  I don’t know why——­”

“You can’t marry Searle,” he interrupted, “because you are going to marry me.”

He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them both.

“Be back by and by,” he added, and off he went, through the kitchen, leaving Beth by the table speechless, burning and confused, with a hundred wild emotions in her heart.

He continued out at the rear of the place, where little Mrs. Dick was valiantly tugging at two large buckets of water.  He relieved her of the burden.

“Say, Priscilla,” he drawled, “if a smoke-faced Easterner comes around here while I’m gone, looking for—­you know—­Miss Kent, remember he can’t have a room in your house if he offers a million and walks on his hands and prays in thirteen languages.”

Little Mrs. Dick glanced up at him shrewdly.

“Have you got it as bad as that?  Snakes alive!  All right, I guess I’ll remember.”

“Be good,” said Van, and off he went to the assayer’s shop for which he had started before.

The assayer glanced up briefly.  He was busy at a bucking-board, where, with energetic application of a very heavy weight, on the end of a handle, he was grinding up a lot of dusty ore.