“Your prospects are not very bright, I fear.”

“I shall keep my head above water,” said Paul.  “Oh, please don’t!” he cried, shivering.  “You have been so good to me.  I can’t bear you to have seen that thing.  I can’t stand it.”

“My dear boy,” she said, coming a little nearer, “I don’t think the worse of you for that.  On the contrary, I admire your pluck and your brave attitude towards life.  Indeed I do.  I respect you for it.  Do you remember the old Italian story of Ser Federigo and his falcon?  How he hid his poverty like a knightly gentleman?  You see what I mean, don’t you?  You mustn’t be angry with me!”

Her words were Gilead balm of instantaneous healing.

“Angry?”

His voice quavered.  In a revulsion of emotion he turned blindly, seized her hand and kissed it.  It was all he could do.

“If I have found it out—­not just now,” she quickly interjected, seeing him wince, “but long ago—­it was not your fault.  You’ve made a gallant gentleman’s show to the end—­until I come, in a perfectly brutal way, and try to upset it.  Tell me—­I’m old enough to be your mother, and you must know by this time that I’m your friend—­have you any resources at all—­beyond—?” She made ever so slight a motion of her hand toward the hidden pawn ticket.

“No,” said Paul, with his sure tact and swiftly working imagination.  “I had just come to an end of them.  It’s a silly story of losses and what-not—­I needn’t bother you with it.  I thought I would walk to London, with the traditional half-crown in my pocket”—­he flashed a wistful smile—­“and seek my fortune.  But I fell ill at your gates.”

“And now that you’re restored to health, you propose in the same debonair fashion to—­well—­to resume the search?”

“Of course,” said Paul, all the fighting and aristocratic instincts returning.  “Why not?”

There were no tears in his eyes now, and they looked with luminous fearlessness at Miss Winwood.  He drew a chair to the edge of the bearskin.  “Won’t you sit down, Miss Winwood?”

She accepted the seat.  He sat down too.  Before replying she played with her fan rather roughly—­more or less as a man might have played with it.  “What do you think of doing?”

“Journalism,” said Paul.  He had indeed thought of it.

“Have you any opening?”

“None,” he laughed.  “But that’s the oyster I’m going to open.”

Miss Winwood took a cigarette from a silver box near by.  Paul sprang to light it.  She inhaled in silence half a dozen puffs.  “I’m going to ask you an outrageous question,” she said, at last.  “In the first place, I’m a severely business woman, and in the next I’ve got an uncle and a brother with cross-examining instincts, and, though I loathe them—­the instincts, I mean—­I can’t get away from them.  We’re down on the bedrock of things, you and I. Will you tell me, straight, why you went away to-day to—­to”—­she hesitated—­“to pawn your watch and chain, instead of waiting till you got to London?”