“He wasn’t maimed for life,” declared Teddie, with the last of her desolation gone, “but he got exactly what he deserved.”
“That, of course, is a matter not for us but for the courts to decide,” remarked William Shotwell, with a lugubrious shake of the head.
“Then what’s the use of us talking about it now?” demanded Teddie, with a glance at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight.
“It was merely to save you pain,” remarked her benefactor as he rose from his chair.
“It seems rather an expensive anesthetic,” observed Teddie, “at twenty-five thousand dollars a whiff!”
“Am I to understand, then, that you intend to contest this claim?” demanded the man of law, taking up his hat.
Teddie swung about on him, with a little flush of anger on her magnolia-white cheeks. Then, for once in her life, discretion put a hand on the sleeve of impulse. About her rebellious young body she felt the phantasmal jaws of her Uncle Charlton’s waffle-iron coming closer and closer together.
“I must decline to enter into any discussion of the matter until I have seen my attorney,” she said with dignity. It was what was usually said, she remembered, at all such junctures.
“Then might I inquire just who your attorney is?” inquired William Shotwell.
And Teddie’s dignity, for a moment, betrayed serious evidences of collapsing. She had no attorney. She didn’t even know of any attorney. But she couldn’t afford to betray her isolation.