“You still haven’t told me how you know so much about him.”
Simon’s glance switched off the verandah again. His car was just pulling up in front of the house.
“There isn’t time now,” he said. “I’ll tell you presently. Just for now, it’d be so much better if your father didn’t know anything about it. He’s a swell guy and everything else, but he just doesn’t know these games. You’ve backed me so far. Will you back me some more?”
She took a long quiet breath. She was aloof in a dispassionate appraisal that few other women he had ever known could have simulated, let alone made sincere. Yet it all died in the helpless quirk of her shoulders and the surrendering downward turn of her lips.
“I’m nuts,” she whispered. “But I’d back you to hell and back.”
“One way is enough,” he said. “There are no bets on the return journey.”
But his eyes said everything else that there was no time to speak.
And then he was rising to greet Don Morland as he came up the porch steps, as though nothing at all had happened since they had parted.
The old man’s step was quick and nervous, and he asked the obvious question in the most obviously conventional way.
“Who was that fellow I passed on the road?”