Harry gave her a long look. She met it with a steady smile. He held out his hand.
"Thank you. We'll forget. There's my hand on it."
She gave a little laugh, shook her head, and put her hands behind her back.
"I seem to remember it began that way before," she said, and darted past him swiftly.
That was how they set about forgetting the stolen kiss.
Chapter XIII.
A LOVER LOOKS PALE.
It speedily appeared that Gilly Foot had other than pecuniary reasons for wanting a partner; he wanted a pair of hands to work for him. He was lazy, at times even lethargic; nothing could make him hurry. He hated details, and, above all other details, figures. His work was to hatch ideas; somebody else had to bring up the chickens. Andy could hardly have allowed the cool shuffling-off of all the practical business work on to his shoulders—which was what happened as soon as he had learnt even the rudiments of it—had it not been that the ideas were good. The indolent young man would sit all the morning—not that his morning began very early—apparently doing nothing, then spend two hours at lunch at the restaurant, come back smoking a large cigar, and after another hour's rumination be delivered of an idea. The budding business—Andy wondered how it had even budded under a gardener who no doubt planted but never watered—lay mainly with educational works; and here Gilly's ingenuity came in. He was marvellously good at guessing what would appeal to a schoolmaster; how or whence he got this instinct it was impossible to say; it seemed just a freak of genius. The prospectus of a new "series," or the "syllabus" of a new course of study (contained in Messrs. Gilbert Foot and Co.'s primers) became in his hands a most skilful bait. And if he hooked one schoolmaster, as he pointed out to Andy, it was equivalent to hooking scores, perhaps hundreds, conceivably thousands, of boys. Girls too perhaps! Gilly was all for the higher education of girls. Generations of the youth of both sexes rose before his prophetically sanguine eye, all brought up on Gilbert Foot and Co.'s primers.
"A single really good idea for a series may mean a small fortune, Andy," he would say impressively. "And now I think I may as well go to lunch."
Andy accepted the situation and did the hard work. He also provided his partner with a note-book, urging him to put down (or, failing that, to get somebody else to put down) any brilliant idea which occurred to him at lunch. For himself he made a rule—lunch at the restaurant not more than once a week. Only ideas justified lunch there every day. Lunch there might be good for ideas; it was not good for figures.