She turned to the waiter, and, carefully studying the prices, she gave him an order.

“One portion for two, remember, of the fish and the salad,” she enjoined.  “Two portions of the chicken, if you think one won’t be enough.”

She leaned back in her place.

“It’s going to cost you, when you’ve paid for the claret, a matter of four dollars and fifty cents, this dinner,” she said, “and I guess you’ll have to give the waiter a quarter.  Are you scared?”

He laughed at her once more.

“Not a bit!”

She looked at his long, delicate fingers—­studied him for a moment.  Notwithstanding his clothes, there was an air of breeding about him, unconcealable, a thing apart, even, from his good looks.

“Clerk, were you?” she remarked.  “Seems to me you’re used to spending two dollars on a meal all right.  I’m not!”

“Neither am I,” he assured her.  “One doesn’t have much opportunity of spending money in—­Jamaica.”

“You seem kind of used to it, somehow,” she persisted.  “Have you come into money, then?”

“I’ve saved a little,” he explained, with a rather grim smile, “and I’ve—­well, shall we say come into some?”

“Stolen it, maybe,” she observed indifferently.

“Should you be horrified if I told that I had?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “I’m one of those who’s lived honest, and I sometimes wonder whether it pays.”

“It’s a great problem,” he sighed.

“It is that,” she admitted gloomily.  “I’ve got a friend—­she used to live in our place, just below me—­Stella Kimbell, her name is.  She and I learnt our typewriting together and started in the same office.  We stood it, somehow, for three years, sometimes office work, sometimes at home.  We didn’t have much luck.  It was always better for me than for Stella, because she was good-looking, and I’m not.”

“I shouldn’t say that,” he remonstrated.  “You’ve got beautiful eyes, you know.”

“You stop it!” she warned him firmly.  “My eyes are my own, and I’ll trouble you not to make remarks about them.”

“Sorry,” Philip murmured, duly crushed.

“The men were after her all the time,” the girl continued, reminiscently.  “Last place we were at, a dry goods store not far from here, the heads of the departments used to make her life fairly miserable.  She held out, though, but what with fines, and one thing or another, they forced her to leave.  So I did the same.  We drifted apart then for a while.  She got a job at an automobile place, and I was working at home.  I remember the night she came to me—­I was all alone.  Pop had got a three-line part somewhere and was bragging about it at all the bars in Broadway.  Stella came in quite suddenly and almost out of breath.

“‘Kid,’ she said, ‘I’m through with it.’

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked her.