“Duane,” she said, “it occurred to me just now that you might have really mistaken what I said and did the other night.”  She hesitated, nerving herself to encounter his eyes, lifted and levelled across the top of his paper at her.

He waited; she retained enough self-command to continue with an effort at lightness: 

“Of course it was all carnival fun—­my pretending to mistake you for Mr. Dysart.  You understood it, didn’t you?”

“Why, of course,” he said, smiling.

She went on:  “I—­don’t exactly remember what I said—­I was trying to mystify you.  But it occurred to me that perhaps it was rather imprudent to pretend to be on—­on such impossible terms with Mr. Dysart——­”

There was something too painful in her effort for him to endure.  He said laughingly, not looking at her: 

“Oh, I wasn’t ass enough to be deceived, Sylvia.  Don’t worry, little girl.”  And he resumed the study of his paper.

Minutes passed—­terrible minutes for one of them, who strove to find relief in his careless reassurance, tried desperately to believe him, to deceive that intuition which seldom fails her sex.

He, with the print blurred and meaningless before him, sat miserable, dumb with the sympathy he could not show, hot with the anger he dared not express.  He thought of Dysart as he had revealed himself, now gone back to town to face that little crop of financial rumours concerning the Algonquin that persisted so wickedly and would not be quieted.  For the first time in his life, probably, Dysart was compelled to endure the discomforts of a New York summer—­more discomforts this summer than mere dust and heat and noise.  For men who had always been on respectful financial terms with Dysart and his string of banks and his Algonquin enterprise were holding aloof from him; men who had figured for years in the same columns of print where his name was so often seen as director and trustee and secretary—­fellow-members who served for the honour of serving on boards of all sorts, charity boards, hospital, museum, civic societies—­these men, too, seemed to be politely, pleasantly, even smilingly edging away from him in some indefinable manner.

Which seemed to force him toward certain comparatively newcomers among the wealthy financiers of the metropolis—­brilliant, masterful, restless men from the West, whose friendship in the beginning he had sought, deeming himself farsighted.

Now that his vision had become normally adjusted he cared less for this intimacy which it was too late to break—­at least this was not the time to break it with money becoming unbelievably scarcer every day and a great railroad man talking angrily, and another great railroad man preaching caution at a time when the caution of the man in the Street might mean something so serious to Dysart that he didn’t care to think about it.

Dysart had gone back to New York in company with several pessimistic gentlemen—­who were very open about backing their fancy; and their fancy fell on that old, ramshackle jade, Hard Times, by Speculation out of Folly.  According to them there was no hope of her being scratched or left at the post.