Clancy tushed.
It was at their early dinner that the telephone-bell rang. Clancy answered it. It was Vandervent. He was brisk to the point of terseness.
"Got to see you. Want to ask a few questions. I'll take the eight-twenty. Ask Mrs. Walbrough if she can put me up?"
Mrs. Walbrough, smiling, agreed that she could. Clancy told Vandervent so. He thanked her. His voice lost its briskness.
"Are you—eh—enjoying yourself?"
Clancy demurely replied that she was. "I wish you had time for some tobogganing," she ventured.
"Do you really?" Vandervent was eager. "I'll make time—I—I'll see you to-night, Miss Deane."
Clancy smiled with happy confidence at the things that Vandervent had not said. She played double solitaire with her hostess until eleven o'clock. Then Mrs. Hebron entered with the information that her husband had developed a sudden chest-cold, accompanied by fever, and that she really dreaded letting him meet the train.
Clancy leaped to the occasion. She pooh-poohed Mrs. Walbrough's protests. As if, even in these motorful days, a Zenith girl couldn't hitch an old nag to a sleigh and drive a few rods. And she wouldn't permit Mrs. Walbrough to accompany her, either. Alone, save for a brilliant moon, a most benignant moon, she drove down the hill and over the snow-piled road to the Hinsdale station.
It was a dreamy ride; she was going to meet a man whose voice trembled as he spoke to her, a man who was doing all in his power to save her from dangers, a man who was a Vandervent, one of the great partis of America. Yet it was as a man, rather than as a Vandervent, that she thought of him.