Morrell went directly from Keith's office to Keith's house. He was not particularly angry; for some time he had expected just this result, but since he had threatened, he intended to accomplish. Finding Nan Keith at home, he plunged directly at the subject in his most direct and English fashion. She listened to him steadily until he had finished.

"Is that all?" she then asked him quietly,

"That's all," he acknowledged.

She arose.

"Then I will say, Mr. Morrell, that I do not believe you. I know my husband thoroughly, and I am beginning to know you. I believe that is my only comment. Good afternoon."

He made a half attempt to point to her the way to corroborative evidence, but she swept this superbly aside, Finally he took his correct leave, half angry, half amused, wholly cynical, for to his mind the reason for her indifference to the news he brought lay in what he supposed to be her relations with Ben Sansome.

"Bally ass!" he apostrophized himself. "Might have known how she'd take it."

His reading of Nan's motives was, of course, incorrect. Her first feeling was merely a white heat of anger against Morrell, whom she had never liked. Perhaps after a little this emotion might have carried over into, not distrust, but an uneasiness as to the main issue; but before she had arrived at this point Keith came in to deliver an ill-timed warning. As ill luck would have it, and as such coincidences often come about in the most perverse fashion, Keith had, down the street, met some malicious fool who had dropped a laughing remark about Sansome. It was nothing in itself. Ordinarily, Keith would have paid no attention to it. To-day it clashed with his mood. Even now his jealousy was not stirred in the least, but his sense of appearances was irritated. By the time he had reached home he had worked up a proper indignation.

"Look here, Nan," he blurted out as soon as he had closed the door behind him, "you're seeing too much of Sansome. Everybody's talking."

"Who is everybody?" she asked very quietly.

"Of course I know it's all right," he blundered ahead tactlessly--the gleam in her eye should have warned him that he might have omitted that reassurance--"but just the looks of the thing. And he's such a weak and wishy-washy little nonentity!"

Her sense of justice aroused by this, she sprang to the defence of Sansome.

"You are quite mistaken there," she said with dignity. "Men of that type are never understood by men of yours. He is my friend--and yours. And he has been very kind to both of us."

"Well, just the same, you ought not to get yourself talked about," repeated Keith stubbornly.

"Do you distrust me?" she demanded.

"Heavens, no! But you don't realize how it looks to others. He'............