"Oh, the usual one, I believe. Hard up—wife ill, or something—they always tell the same story. To think the fool had only to sit tight and let her go on admiring him!"

There was a long silence. Tarrant stopped his nervous pacing and returned to his armchair, throwing himself into it with a groan of impatience. "That prize was ours!"

"Ours?"

"Well—isn't he our discovery?" He laughed. "Yours, if you prefer. You're welcome to it. I hold no brief for blackmailers."

She looked at him with astonishment. He had suddenly crowded Vance Weston out of her mind and taken possession of its centre himself. "Blackmailers?" she repeated. She said the word over slowly, once or twice. Then: "But, Lewis, if he's that, what are we? What's the New Hour?"

Tarrant threw back his handsome head and returned her look with faintly raised brows of interrogation, and a glance which declared resignedly: "Ah, now I give up!"

"What are we," his wife went on, "who knew what Jet was, and put the boy in her way, and worked up her imagination about him, all to … " She broke off, vexed with her own exaggerated emotion, yet unable to control it.

Tarrant's tone, in contrast, grew profoundly quiet. "All to—what?"

"Steal the prize for our paper."

He looked at her, still with arched ironic brows. "That's what you call it? Stealing?"

"Don't you? We began to throw that boy in Jet's way months ago—began in this very house, and at your suggestion." (Oh, of course, he interjected, he knew she'd end by putting all the blame on him.) "No, I don't," Halo continued. "I keep my share; and it's a big one. But I see now that we ought both to be ashamed—far more ashamed than Vance. And I am—I'm revolted. If that's the way literature is produced, it had better cease altogether. If it has to be shoved down people's throats like Beauty Products and patent collar buttons it shows our people don't really want it; that's all!"

Tarrant leaned back, and stretched his hand out for a cigar. "Did you ever really think they did?"

Her colour rose. "I suppose I didn't think at all—I just rushed ahead with the crowd. But now … "

"Well—now?"

"Now it seems to me there's only one thing we can do to save our souls—we must lend the boy that money."

Tarrant paused attentively in the lighting of his cigar. "We—?"

"You," she corrected herself, crimsoning. Something, perhaps involuntary, in the inflexion of his voice seemed to imply that, where there was a question of bestowing money, the plural pronoun could hardly be current between them. But his next retort brushed aside the implication.

"We—I? Lend him the money? What on earth are you talking about? He gets us into a damned mess, and we reward him for it?" She was silent. "Is that your idea of it?" he insisted.