I don't often have the luck of seeing you here."

 

     "I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.

 

     Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.

 

     "I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.

 

     "Oh, so-do--depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. "Are you thinking of collecting?"

 

     Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round."

 

     "Selling?"

 

     "Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--"

 

     Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.

 

     "A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not much up on such things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.

 

     "A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?"

 

     "Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him--by one person, you understand; a woman, in fact--"

 

     "Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently.

 

     Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were published."

 

     Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I suppose?"

 

     "Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They were tremendous friends, he and she."

 

     "And she wrote a clever letter?"

 

     "Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn."

 

     A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.

 

     "Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up. "A collection of Margaret Aubyn's letters? Did you say you had them?"

 

     "They were left me--by my friend."

 

     "I see. Was he--well, no matter. You're to be congratulated, at any rate. What are you going to do with them?"

 

     Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. "Oh, I don't know. I haven't thought much about it. I just happened to see that some fellow was writing her life--"

 

     "Joslin; yes. You didn't think of giving them to him?"

 

     Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian cabinet. "What ought I to do? You're just the fellow to advise me." He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.