another, or for no other reason than that he was Dan Mavering and liked every one, he liked them all.  He thought himself great friends with them; he dined and lunched with them; and they knew the Pasmers, and all about his engagement.  But he did not go to any of them now, with the need he felt to impart his calamity, to get the support of come other’s credence and opinion of it.  He went to a friend whom, in the way of his world, he met very seldom, but whom he always found, as he said, just where he had left him.

Boardman never made any sign of suspecting that he was put on and off, according to Dan’s necessity or desire for comfort or congratulation; but it was part of their joke that Dan’s coming to him always meant something decisive in his experiences.  The reporter was at his late breakfast, which his landlady furnished him in his room, though, as Mrs. Mash said, she never gave meals, but a cup of coffee and an egg or two, yes.

“Well?” he said, without looking up.

“Well, I’m done for!” cried Dan.

“Again?” asked Boardman.

“Again!  The other time was nothing, Boardman—­I knew it wasn’t anything; but this—­this is final.”

“Go on,” said Boardman, looking about for his individual salt-cellar, which he found under the edge of his plate; and Mavering laid the whole case before him.  As he made no comment on it for a while, Dan was obliged to ask him what he thought of it.  “Well,” he said, with the smile that showed the evenness of his pretty teeth, “there’s a kind of wild justice in it.”  He admitted this, with the object of meeting Dan’s views in an opinion.

“So you think I’m a faithless man too, do you?” demanded Mavering stormily.

“Not from your point of view,” said Boardman, who kept on quietly eating and drinking.

Mavering was too amiable not to feel Boardman’s innocence of offence in his unperturbed behaviour.  “There was no faithlessness about it, and you know it,” he went on, half laughing, half crying, in his excitement, and making Boardman the avenue of an appeal really addressed to Alice.  “I was ready to do what either side decided.”

“Or both,” suggested Boardman.

“Yes, or both,” said Dan, boldly accepting the suggestion.  “It wouldn’t have cost me a pang to give up if I’d been in the place of either.”

“I guess that’s what she could never understand,” Boardman mused aloud.

“And I could never understand how any one could fail to see that that was what I intended—­expected:  that it would all come out right of itself—­naturally.”  Dan was still addressing Alice in this belated reasoning.  “But to be accused of bad faith—­of trying to deceive any one—­”

“Pretty rough,” said Boardman.

“Rough?  It’s more than I can stand!”

“Well, you don’t seem to be asked to stand it,” said Boardman, and Mavering laughed forlornly with him at his joke, and then walked away and looked out of Boardman’s dormer-window on the roofs below, with their dirty, smoke-stained February snow.  He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face with it.  When he turned round, Boardman looked keenly at him, and asked, with an air of caution, “And so it’s all up?”