"I'm the main loser if he gets away with it."
"Tell me about it."
And Worth gave her a concise account of the theft and his own share in the affair. She listened eagerly now, those innocent great eyes growing big with the interest of it. With her there was no blind stumbling over Worth's motive in buying a suitcase sight unseen. I had guessed, but she understood completely and unquestioningly. When he had finished, she said solemnly,
"You know, don't you, that, if you've got your facts right—if these things you've told me are square, even cubes of fact—they prove Clayte among the wonderful men of the world?"
Worth's big brown paw went out and covered her little hand that lay on the table's edge.
"Now we're getting somewhere," he encouraged her. As for me, I merely snorted.
"Wonderful man, my eye! He's got a wonderful gang behind him."
"Oh, you should have told me that you know there is a gang, Mr. Boyne," she said simply. "Of course, then, the result is different."
"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?"
She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.