“Gee, you’ve gotta get a sense of humour, boy,” she said good-naturedly. “You’re too serious, that’s what’s wrong with you! She’s a good dresser too—that gown she was wearing this afternoon certainly made me feel old.”
He was cooling down now. The uselessness of argument or appeal was so apparent that he fell into her mood.
“I shall finish in a lunatic asylum,” he said, “just as surely as Double Dan will finish in jail.”
“Don’t you worry. The li’l game is going to end very soon. I’m through. John’s due home in a fortnight, and I’m just longing for the smell of rubber an’ oil an’ breakfast. That’s what a ship smells like to me. I’m going to have it out with Dan.”
“You mean, he is coming—that we shall meet?” asked Gordon eagerly.
“We shall meet and he shall part,” she said cryptically, “that’s what. The poor Limburger! And he’s going to split fair. Did he think I’d sit down an’ take his twen’y-eighty? No, sir. As a woman the idea revolts me. I was brought up in a strict fifty-fifty school!”
Gordon was himself again.
“Now I warn you this matter has gone as far as it is going,” he said impressively. “There are fifty thousand dollars in The Study safe, and I’ve no doubt in my mind that that is his objective, though how he came to know this——”
“Fifty thousand!” she breathed. “That explains everything! You told me in one of your heart-to-heart talks that you always kept a thousand pounds, but not——”
“This money was drawn to pay an American,” said Gordon impatiently. “There is no reason why I should explain why it is here. It is in the safe—that is sufficient.”