"You worried about my thirty-five dollars?"
"Some," he admitted, "until I knew you were where you were known."
"Well, except for carfare and a few lunches and small personal expenses, I've it all yet," she reported. "You see, Mrs. Wain won't let me pay anything; I'm a guest of cousin Agnes, she says. If I really needed money, she's several thousand yet in a balance which cousin Agnes left with her, which she'd give me. She's offered already; and besides, I'm positively refusing money these days, Mr. Loutrelle," she talked on in the delight of realizing his companionship again. She sat down in a chair near the table, and he sat near her. "My uncles, both of them, simply insist that I take their money now; I believe uncle Lucas has actually wired to have fifty thousand deposited to my account in the bank at Sheridan."
"Fifty thousand!" Barney repeated.
Ethel nodded. Fifty thousand had not been an unusual amount for her father to have had on deposit, and it was customary for her uncles to have more than that at call. She had not thought, in mentioning it, that Barney Loutrelle had probably not expended fifty hundred dollars in all his life; and this shocked her back to their business together. Before she had met this man whose whole estate consisted of his uniform, of the ring which he had shown her, and what now remained of his hundred and twenty dollars her uncles had been very far from the mood in which they wired money to her account at Sheridan. She had recognized that her finding Barney at St. Florentin and the event which seemed to be the consequence of his presence had wrought this change for her; and she had been thinking of that money as paid for hushing her knowl-
