"No; not even for old times' sake. I've given you the wrong impression completely, if you think there is any obligation on my part. It never got beyond the watch-case picture stage, as I have told you. It might have drifted on to the other things in the course of time, simply because neither of us might have known any better than to let it drift. But that's all a back number, now."
"Just the same, her coming shocked you."
"It certainly did," he confessed soberly; and then: "Have you forgotten what I told you about the circumstances under which I left home?"
"Oh!" she murmured, and as once before there was a little gasp to go with the word. Then: "She wouldn't—she wouldn't——"
"No," he answered; "she wouldn't; but her father would."
"So her father wanted her to marry the other man, did he? What was he like—the other man? I don't believe you've ever told me anything about him."
Smith's laugh was an easing of strains.
"Now your 'control' is playing tricks on you. There were a dozen other men, more or less."
"And her picture was in the watch-case of each?"
"You've pumped me dry," he returned, the sardonic humor reasserting itself. "I haven't her watch-case list; I never had it. But I guess it's within bounds to suppose that she got the little pictures from the photographer by the half-dozen, at least. Young women in my part of the world don't think much of the watch-case habit; I mean they don't regard it seriously."