And even Teddie, as she stood up and shook hands with her new-found champion, was troubled by a vague yet persistent touch of theatricality about the situation as a whole. But she had made her decision, and she intended to stick to it.
She watched Gunboat step to the door, with his hat in his hand, come to a stop, and then step back to the table-end.
“Say,” he said with a slightly self-conscious and not altogether heroic look on his face, “don’t say anything to—to Miss Reamer about this, lady, if yuh don’t mind. It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide. But yuh know what women are!”
And, with an even more fraternal nod of the head, he passed out through the door with his peculiarly light and panther-like tread, and was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Come in,” said Teddie, rather shakily.
The bronze Moorish knocker on her studio-door had sounded ominously through the quietness, and even that second wind of courage which had come to her at the eleventh hour seemed to vanish before a sudden and rather breathless sense of impending culmination, not unlike that which once thrilled her childish body when an asbestos stage-curtain rolled up.
For thirty tense minutes, indeed, Teddie had been doing her best to work on a sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight, slightly bewildered by the discovery that an ineradicable quaver in her fingers was giving uninvited Childe-Hassan vibrations to her lines. And now she had no need to look still again at her watch to become aware of the fact that it was exactly three minutes to three.
If her visitor was Raoul Uhlan, she remembered, that meant five full minutes before Gunboat Dorgan would arrive on the scene. It would be five full minutes, even though Gunboat should keep his word and be on time. It meant three hundred precious seconds, she reminded herself with an involuntary tremor, in which almost anything could happen.
Even before the door quietly opened, in fact, Teddie found herself failing to feel as valorous as she had expected. She hadn’t slept well, and she hadn’t eaten well, and the more she had thought over the melodrama which she was engineering into the dove-breasted days of her tranquillity the more disquieting the entire arrangement became to her. And her emotions were still playing tennis with her resolution, making her dread at one moment that her enemy might fail to appear and leaving her afraid the next moment that he might indeed return.