"Well—I'll be damned!" said Moffatt gaily.
"You've always been so awfully nice," she began; and he leaned back, grasping both sides of the chair-back, and shaking it a little with his laugh.
He kept the same attitude while she proceeded to unfold her case, listening to her with the air of sober concentration that his frivolous face took on at any serious demand on his attention. When she had ended he kept the same look during an interval of silent pondering. "Is it the fellow who was over at Nice with you that day?"
She looked at him with surprise. "How did you know?"
"Why, I liked his looks," said Moffatt simply. He got up and strolled toward the window. On the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her. He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. "Say—" he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back.
"Then you think if you had the cash you could fix it up all right with the Pope?"
Her heart began to beat. She remembered that he had once put a job in Ralph's way, and had let her understand that he had done it partly for her sake.
"Well," he continued, relapsing into hyperbole, "I wish I could send the old gentleman my cheque to-morrow morning: but the fact is I'm high and dry." He looked at her with a sudden odd intensity. "If I WASN'T, I dunno but what—" The phrase was lost in his familiar whistle. "That's an awfully fetching way you do your hair," he said. It was a disappointment to Undine to hear that his affairs were not prospering, for she knew that in his world "pull" and solvency were closely related, and that such support as she had hoped he might give her would be contingent on his own situation. But she had again a fleeting sense of his mysterious power of accomplishing things in the teeth of adversity; and she answered: "What I want is your advice."
He turned away and wandered across the room, his hands in his pockets. On her ornate writing desk he saw a photograph of Paul, bright-curled and sturdy-legged, in a manly reefer, and bent over it with a murmur of approval. "Say—what a fellow! Got him with you?"
Undine coloured. "No—" she began; and seeing his look of surprise, she embarked on her usual explanation. "I can't tell you how I miss him," she ended, with a ring of truth that carried conviction to her own ears if not to Moffatt's.