“How do you do, Miss Child?” Jim Logan cordially inquired, holding out his hand.  “This is mighty good of you!”

A thousand thoughts whirled after each other through the girl’s head, like the mechanical horses on a circular toy race course, such as she had often sold at Peter Rolls’s.  Round and round they wildly turned for an instant, then began to slow down.

This house was closed for the summer.  The front was boarded up, and perhaps the back windows also.  No lights could be seen, and probably no sounds heard.  Two places only were laid for supper.  Lily, then, had gone—­had always meant to go and leave her here, had been bribed to bring her and go.  Oh, but it must have been a big bribe this time, for surely Lily Leavitt would never dare look her in the face again!  One of them would have to disappear from the mantle department of the Hands.  Was Logan giving Lily enough money to make up for a sacrifice of all those commissions, or did Lily think that after to-night she—­Winifred Child—­would never come back to Peter Rolls’s?

As that question asked itself loud bells jangled in Win’s head.  She felt as if she were losing her senses.  But no, she must not—­must not do that.  Never in her life had she so much need to keep them all as now, in this locked house, where she had no help to hope for save what her own wits might give, and no one could hear or see what happened to her except this smiling man and his well-trained servant.  For all outside this was an empty house.

She steadied herself, the more readily because something in the narrow eyes twinkling into hers said that Jim Logan had expected her to scream and make a scene.  Never until now had she imagined it possible to be afraid of him.  In the park, when he had stopped his car to follow and speak to her, she had been a little startled, a good deal annoyed.  Then, when Ursus had opportunely arrived to frighten him away as easily as the Spider frightened Miss Muffet, she had been impishly amused.

In Toys at Peter Rolls’s she had been vexed, irritated, but never hotly angry.  The young man’s persistence had not seemed serious enough to call “persecution.”  She had rather enjoyed “shunting” him off upon Lily Leavitt, and thwarting him through Cupid and Earl Usher.  It had never occurred to her that behind the unfailing smile and the twinkling gray eyes the brutal ferocity of the animal might lurk.

She had thought that he had forgotten her long ago and turned his attentions elsewhere.  What girl, unless silly and Victorian, would be afraid of a dude who lived for the sleekness of his hair and the spick-and-spanness of his clothes?  Yet now Win was afraid, and she did not think it was because she had suddenly become silly or Victorian.  This aquiline-faced young man with the prominent jaw was looking at her as the primitive brute looks at the prey under his paws, and if he smiled and twinkled, it was but as the primitive brute might purr.