"I have known him for a long time," Conetta said thoughtfully. Then she agreed with me: "We'll leave him out; he cancels himself on the minus side of the equation, as you used to say of certain people we knew in the old days at home."
I wasn't half sure enough of myself to be willing to have her drag in the old days, so I urged her to go on with her cataloguing of our fellow castaways, saying: "You haven't completed the list yet."
"There is one more to be omitted—Hobart Ingerson," she said soberly, with a shadow of deep disgust coming into her eyes.
"Will Madeleine omit him?" I asked quickly.
"If she doesn't—after what we've been compelled to see and feel and endure! Dick, it's dreadful; simply dreadful!"
"Yet she will marry him," I insisted—purely to hear what my companion would say to that.
"It is unbelievable. What possible motive could she have in doing such an unspeakable thing?"
"A few minutes ago you called her an angel; perhaps it will be the angelic motive. Her father needs money; needs a very considerable sum of money, and needs it badly. She knows of the need—though I think she doesn't know the immediate and exciting cause of it—and she also knows that Ingerson is willing to buy and pay."
"How perfectly horrible!" said my watchmate, with a shudder. And then: "What a pity it is that Madeleine's money was all swallowed up in that bank failure out West."
I smiled when she said that. Madeleine's fortune hadn't gone in any bank failure, neither out West nor back East. This was only another of Holly Barclay's plausible little fictions.