"I am no good for work today, Olive. The truth is I want to say something to you and I don't know whether I have the right.
"Olive!"
For an instant Olive changed color. Then she answered.
"I can hardly imagine anything you haven't the right to say to me, Bryan. You often talk of your gratitude for what I have done for you. But I wonder if you know what you have done for me? I have never had so kind a friend except Jack. It is always difficult for me to think of her as Lady Kent."
"But I am not your friend," Bryan returned brusquely, "and it is about that and about Lady Jack I want to talk to you. The truth is it's absurd to call a man your friend when he loves you. Of course I feel I am not all of a man these days and I have not much money and my art may never come to anything."
"Any more disqualifications, Bryan?" Olive asked softly. Perhaps she was not altogether surprised at what she was at present hearing.
"Oh yes, a great many," Captain MacDonnell returned, "only I think I won't tell you about them just now."
"And what has Jack to do with what you wish to say to me?" Olive asked, and this time spoke more seriously.
"Oh, she has nothing at all to do with it now," Captain MacDonnell returned. "Only once upon a time before I met you, I used to think Lady Jack was the most attractive woman I had ever known. I used also to believe that as long as Frank had gotten ahead of me I never wished to marry. But I suppose the real fact was that I wanted one of what Lady Jack told me you called yourselves? The Ranch Girls, wasn't it? Only I had not seen the real one in those days."
"Look here, Bryan, you need not think I ever forget you are an Irishman," Olive laughed. "Yet I think I like your flattery."