As they watched her drive away in the brougham that was waiting for her, accompanied by the man who never had to work, they could scarcely believe that she was not what she looked at that distance—a girl of little more than twenty.
“A fine old world!” Ruddy stuck his hands in his trousers pockets. “One’s always walkin’ round the corner and findin’ something. It’s the walkin’ round the corner that does it.”
“Seems so,” Teddy assented.
They climbed on a bus and drove back through the evening primroses of street-lamps to Eden Row. After all, in spite of Mr. Yaffon, Mr. Ooze, Hal, and all the other disappointed persons, it must be a fine old world when it allowed boys to be so young.
CHAPTER XXV—LUCK
“Not a word to your mother,” Mr. Sheerug had warned Ruddy after his first interview with Duke Nineveh. “She wouldn’t understand—not yet. Um! Um!”
What he had meant was she would have understood too well. Ruddy communicated this urgent need for secrecy to Teddy. “Can’t make it out—what he’s up to.”
They watched carefully, feeling that whatever Mr. Sheerug was up to, it was something in which they also were concerned.