“It’s from the young lady you’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs?” he asked at length.

“It’s from the young lady I’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs.”

“Well—­I suppose she’s gone away,” continued Vyse, rebuilding his countenance rapidly.

“Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead Letter Office.”

Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn.  “After all, the same thing happened to me—­with ‘Hester Macklin,’ I mean,” he recalled sheepishly.

“Just so,” said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the table. “_ Just so_,” he repeated, in italics.

He caught his secretary’s glance, and held it with his own for a moment.  Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something scared and squirming.

“The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote me this from there,” he said, holding up the last Florida missive.

“Ha!  That’s funny,” said Vyse, with a damp forehead.

“Yes, it’s funny; it’s funny,” said Betton.  He leaned back, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the cornice.  Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited.

“Shall I get to work?” he began, after a silence measurable by minutes.  Betton’s gaze descended from the cornice.

“I’ve got your seat, haven’t I?” he said, rising and moving away from the table.

Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and began to stir about vaguely among the papers.

“How’s your father?” Betton asked from the hearth.

“Oh, better—­better, thank you.  He’ll pull out of it.”

“But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?”

“Yes—­it was touch and go when I got there.”

Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.

“And I suppose,” Betton continued in a steady tone, “your anxiety made you forget your usual precautions—­whatever they were—­about this Florida correspondence, and before you’d had time to prevent it the Swazee post-office blundered?”

Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement.  “What do you mean?” he asked, pushing his chair back.

“I mean that you saw I couldn’t live without flattery, and that you’ve been ladling it out to me to earn your keep.”

Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his pen.  “What on earth are you driving at?” he repeated.

“Though why the deuce,” Betton continued in the same steady tone, “you should need to do this kind of work when you’ve got such faculties at your service—­those letters were magnificent, my dear fellow!  Why in the world don’t you write novels, instead of writing to other people about them?”

Vyse straightened himself with an effort.  “What are you talking about, Betton?  Why the devil do you think I wrote those letters?”