"Yes, Nora?"
"May I ask you a question—straight?"
"Of course!"
"Don't think I mean to say a word against Jocelyn Thew. He's a white man through and through, and I think if there was any woman in the world he cared for, she would be his slave. But he's a desperate man. Even now the police are trying to draw their net around him. It was all very well for you, when you were painting New York red, to choose your friends where it pleased you, but your sister—she's different, isn't she?—what they call over on our side a society belle. I am not saying that there is a single person in the world too good for Jocelyn Thew to sit down with, but at the present moment—well, he's hard up against it. Things might happen to him, you know, Dick."
For a moment the young man was silent. His eyes seemed to look through the walls of the room, seemed to conjure up some spectre from which a moment later he shrank.
"You see, Nora," he explained, dropping his voice a little, "there was just one time when Jocelyn Thew stood by me like a brick. I was hard up against it and he saved me."
She leaned a little closer to him.
"I have often wondered," she murmured. "That was the affair down at the
Murchison country house, wasn't it?"
Richard Beverley assented silently.
"Guess we'll drink these cocktails," he said, watching the waiter approach. "Flying takes something out of you all the time, you know, Nora, and although when I am up my nerves are like a rock, I sometimes feel a little shaky at leave time."