“So the best thing you can do, Teddie,” her new-found adviser was saying to her, “is to leave this entirely in my hands for a day or two. All I’m going to ask you to do is to keep mum, to sit tight. Before the week-end, I feel sure, we’ll have the whole thing straightened out. And, by the way, what’s the name and address of your prize-fighter’s lady-friend?”
He remained solemnity incarnate as he jotted Ruby Reamer’s name and address down on his scratch-pad.
“Has it occurred to you,” he said as he wrote, without looking up, “that this man Dorgan might have been the proper person for Uhlan to take action against?”
“I imagine he saw about all he wanted to of Dorgan,” announced Teddie, with the icicle-look once more in her eyes.
“But not all he wanted to of you?” questioned Gerry, pretending to ignore her eye-flash of indignation. It was not often that he’d enjoyed the luxury of finding Teddie Hayden on the defensive, and he intended to make the most of it. “It’s quite apparent he isn’t afraid of you!”
“I was hoping you could make him that way,” acknowledged Teddie. She said it quietly, but there was a barb in it which Gerry couldn’t quite overlook.
“Well, we’ll get him that way,” he announced with vigor, as he rose to his feet. “If it’s action they’re after, they’ll get all they want!”
A consciousness of clearing skies both elated and depressed the brooding-eyed Teddie. What Gerry was doing for her was being done merely in the way of a professional duty for which he would be duly paid. But they had been friends once, and she had treated him, she remembered, rather rottenly of late. She wanted to say something about that, make some effort to explain it away, yet she didn’t quite know how to get that belated mood of repentance into words.
So, as she rose from her chair, she didn’t even try to put it into words. She merely smiled softly and gratefully up into Gerry’s eyes as he stood beside her, with the magnolia-white of her cheeks tinging into pink as he stared back at her, with his jaw-muscles set and a quick look of pain on the face that still remained preoccupied.
“It’s—it’s awfully good of you, Gerry,” she said as she held out her hand to him.