"Queer bird, Tibbetts!" said the other curiously. "They call him
Bones, don't they?"
"I never do," said the girl quietly; "only his friends have that privilege. He is one of the best men I have ever met."
"Sentimental, quixotic, and all that sort of thing, eh?" said Jackson, and the girl flushed.
"He has never been sentimental with me," she said, but did not deceive the student of men.
When the train had left the station, he drove straightaway to Devonshire Street. Bones was in his study, reading, or pretending to read, and the last person he expected to see that evening was Mr. Jackson Hyane. But the welcome he gave to that most unwelcome visitor betrayed neither his distrust nor his frank dislike of the young well-groomed man in evening-dress who offered him his hand with such a gesture of good fellowship.
"Sit down, Mr.—er——" said Bones.
There was a cold, cold feeling at his heart, a sense of coming disaster, but Bones facing the real shocks and terrors of life was a different young man from the Bones who fussed and fumed over its trifles.
"I suppose you wonder why I have come to see you, Mr. Tibbetts," said Hyane, taking a cigarette from the silver box on the table. "I rather wonder why I have the nerve to see you myself. I've come on a very delicate matter."
There was a silence.
"Indeed?" said Bones a little huskily, and he knew instinctively what that delicate matter was.