What complication-loving fiend should have brought to her recollection then the vision of that pictured face which had made such an impression upon her—the face of the disinherited heir of Lant Hall? The leaven of her father’s cynical philosophy almost moved her to experiment on this corpus vili ready to her hand, and ascertain whether his protestations would go the length of espousing her ideas of right and wrong as regarded that particular subject. But she restrained herself in time.
Very dejectedly and in silence he walked beside her as far as their ways lay together. He would fain have reopened his pleadings, but with a hurried farewell she left him before he could detain her.
“Well, Chickie? Been having it out with Geoffry Plantagenet?” said her father, who, from his library window, had witnessed their parting at the divergence of the roads.
“Yes; that’s just what I have been doing. And—I think, dear, we oughtn’t to laugh at poor Geoffry quite so much.”
“Oh, that’s how the land lies, is it?” answered Mr Santorex, struck by the unwonted gravity which she had brought to bear upon the subject. “All right, we won’t. Not that we shall have much longer to laugh at anyone,” he added somewhat ruefully.
Chapter Seventeen.
War Wolf is “Wanted.”
“Say, Vipan. Guess we’d better draw off out o’ this for a bit. There’s no call for us to help do police work just now, and we can’t stand looking on. There’ll be hair-lifting here in a minute, I reckon.”