“Not much.”

“If I were a woman in love and had lost money, I would still think of the man I was fond of; but when you think of your business, I fly right out of your mind.”

“Women would be a heap better off if they didn’t stew so much over their love affairs.”

She was dropping purplish brown leaves on him one by one. When a large-sized one took the ashes off the end of his cigar, she laughed gaily, and in a heart-whole fashion, and said, “’Steban, I believe you’ve lost every cent of money you’ve saved.”

“No, I haven’t,” he growled.

“How much have you left?”

“It’s that confounded McGray in New York,” he said, in abrupt and deep-seated resentment. “He’s absconded. I trusted him—thought he was a sure thing on investments. I can’t watch the markets from the Atlantic. There will be a lot of our line out by him.”

“Poor captains!” murmured Nina. Then bending low down on her branch, she said, pleadingly:

“’Steban, tell me all about it.”

“You would not understand. I have said all I am going to say.”