Ruth sprang to her feet; then knitted her brows in an effort to keep back an exclamation of pain and impatience. That ankle again!
“I must go at once and see—” she began, but Tom interrupted her with more than his usual firmness.
“You can’t go anywhere just now. See, you can hardly walk!”
“Was there no clew to the thief?” asked Ruth, after a moment.
“Nothing but a few greasy fingermarks, Miss Fielding,” replied Schultz.
“But we’ve got to get back those films!” cried Ruth, her eyes suddenly blazing in her white face as she turned fiercely upon the three cameramen. “You are responsible for the magazines. You allowed two of them to be stolen. Now you’ve got to get them back for me! Do you hear? Get them back for me!”
When Schultz and Traymore and Atwater left the conference some time later they were three very much subdued and anxious men. No one wanted more than they to recover the missing magazines and no one knew better than they how difficult, perhaps impossible, a task this would be.
For a long time after they had left her Ruth sat silent in the big chair, chin on palm, eyes brooding.
“It’s hard, hard luck, Helen,” she said, when the latter would have comforted her. “Or rather, I might say, it’s Bloomberg! He seems to have been a little too clever for me, after all. My, how tired I am!”
This mood of desolation lasted through a phantom-filled, restless night, but was partially dissolved by the sun of a brilliant northern day. When the first rays of the sun streamed across her face Ruth threw back the covers and anxiously regarded her injured ankle.