Jimmie Mason looked frightened and tried to push in front of me. I put my left hand on his shoulder and shoved him back from the bar. Then I felt a hand gripping my right shoulder hard, and heard a cool voice saying urgently, “Brett! I want you to meet someone.”

I recognized Millicent Jane’s voice. Millicent has always been one of my favorite people. She not only writes extremely well, but she is poised and lovely and clever.

How much Millicent had seen or sensed of what was going on between Lew Recker and me, I don’t know. But the interruption was opportune enough, and I set my teeth together hard and turned to see Millicent smiling coolly and holding the arm of a girl wearing a simple, black crepe dress. And she had pleasant, intelligent features, dark brown ringlets on her head and one of the most kissable mouths I’ve ever looked at.

I said, “Hi, Millicent. I’ll buy a drink,” but she shook her head and stepped back a little and said in her rich voice, “I’ll take a rain-check on it, Brett. This is Elsie Murray, who’s here as a guest tonight and she’s been dying to meet you all evening. Why don’t you buy her a drink?”

I said, “I will,” and “Hello, Elsie. Why should you be dying to meet a has-been like me? I’m not Matthew Blood, you know.”

She said, “I know.” She was tall for a girl. Five-eight, I’d guess, and she held herself erect as though she were proud of her height. “I know all about you, Mr. Halliday. I’ve read every book you ever wrote. Not

only that, but I actually went to the trouble of getting them all together and reading them in the order in which they were written, from DIVIDEND ON DEATH right through to ONE NIGHT WITH NORA.”

She didn’t say it gushingly, but with a quiet sincerity that made it sound real.