“You intend—hm!—you intend to go straight if I give you your chance?” inquired Mr. Foster in stern, manly accents.
“Oh, yes; I promise. I’ll never shoot anybody again, I swear it. Oh, do say you’ll shelter me, Mr. Foster? They’ll kill me if you don’t.”
Mr. Foster coughed with some importance. “Don’t distress yourself, my dear. I’ll shelter you.”
“And they’ll probably kill you if you do,” remarked the girl gloomily.
“Come, come,” adjured Mr. Foster, hiding a certain apprehension under a very hearty manner. “This sounds almost as bad as a penny-dreadful, you know.”
“There’s no penny-dreadful ever written half so terrible as The Exploits of the Man with the Broken Nose,” replied Dora, coining a snappy title.
“Ah, yes. Now, my dear, we must go into that. I want you, if you won’t interview the police yourself, to give all possible information about him to me,”—here Mr. Foster, who had become a little deflated, swelled once more—“and I’ll see that it is put to the best possible use. Without involving yourself, of course. Now, I’m just going up to the house to cancel something I was going to do this morning, and then I’ll come back to hear your story.”
“Very well,” nodded Dora.
The door clicked behind him.
“Well,” observed Dora to its unresponsive surface, “God help his wife!”