“Earned by your voice?” he asked, kindly.

“Every penny of it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t waste it on Blantyre, if I were you.  No, by Heaven, you shall not do it, even if it can be done!  It is too horrible.”

“I owe it to myself to do it.  After all, he is still my husband.  I have let it be so; and while it is so, and while”—­her eyes looked away, her face suffused slightly, her lips tightened—­“while things are as they are, I am bound—­bound by something, I don’t know what, but it is not love, and it is not friendship—­to come to his rescue.  There will be legal expenses—­”

Byng frowned.  “Yes, but the others wouldn’t see him in a hole—­yet I’m not sure, either, Blantyre being Blantyre.  In any case, I’m ready to do anything you wish.”

She smiled gratefully.  “Did you ever know any one to do a favor who wasn’t asked to repeat it—­paying one debt by contracting another, finding a creditor who will trust, and trading on his trust?  Yet I’d rather owe you two debts than most men one.”  She held out her hand to him.  “Well, it doesn’t do to mope—­’The merry heart goes all the day, the sad one tires in a mile-a.’  And I am out for all day.  Please wish me a happy new year.”

He took her hand in both of his.  “I wish you to go through this year as you ended the last—­in a blaze of glory.”

“Yes, really a blaze if not of glory,” she said, with bright tears, yet laughing, too, a big warm humour shining in her strong face with the dark brown eyes and the thick, heavy eyebrows under a low, broad forehead like his own.  They were indeed strangely alike in many ways both of mind and body.

“They say we end the year as we begin it,” he said, cheerily.  “You proved to Destiny that you were entitled to all she could give in the old year, and you shall have the best that’s to be had in 1897.  You are a woman in a million, and—­”

“May I come and breakfast with you some morning?” she asked, gaily.

“Well, if ever I’m thought worthy of that honour, don’t hesitate.  As the Spanish say, It is all yours.”  He waved a hand to the surroundings.

“No, it is all yours,” she said, reflectively, her eyes slowly roaming about her.  “It is all you.  I’m glad to have been here, to be as near as this to your real life.  Real life is so comforting after the mock kind so many of us live; which singers and actors live anyhow.”

She looked round the room again.  “I feel—­I don’t know why it is, but I feel that when I’m in trouble I shall always want to come to this room.  Yes, and I will surely come; for I know there’s much trouble in store for me.  You must let me come.  You are the only man I would go to like this, and you can’t think what it means to me—­to feel that I’m not misunderstood, and that it seems absolutely right to come.  That’s because any woman could trust you—­as I do.  Good-bye.”

In another moment she had gone, and he stood beside the table with the envelope she had left with him.  Presently he opened it, and unfolded the cheque which was in it.  Then he gave an exclamation of astonishment.