"How am I to spend my ill-gotten gains?" The man asked it with purposeful lightness. "There's about three hundred dollars that you contributed; shall we give it to Dora?"
The two faces darkened. Minga threw away her sandwich. She turned and faced him, impudently looking him up and down. Her dark blue eyes glittered with a cold dislike that almost startled the man. He regarded her with puzzled concern, amazed at the variability of this little creature whom he had already seen under so many different phases of emotion. Now, Watts thought, Minga looked really dangerous; something was added to her usual rebelliousness.
"Oh," said the girl flippantly, "let's do something for Dora by all means, buy her a grand piano."
He did not answer. She went on bitterly: "That will make you more comfortable anyway."
"I've disappointed you?" the man questioned gently. Then trying again for lightness, "I was not worthy of my hire."
"Ah," with quick dislike, "disappointed us? You've been treacherous to us."
He was quiet, waiting to hear what she had further to say.
"With your power," contemptuously, "with your prestige, to just talk, to sermonize and philosophize and make no appeal for him, for Terry. Oh," said the girl excitedly, "it was like going past a drowning person in a boat, telling all the while how to make the boat safer for all the safe people, letting the person drown——" She caught her breath with a sob.
Sard and Dunstan looked wonderingly on this sudden eloquence. It was not Minga's way to vibrate to the sorrow of the under-dog. Only Watts' shrewd brain guessed at the emotions that underlay the girl's present scorn. The trained eyes perceived what was the dynamo that augmented this passion. With something very tender in the gesture he tried to take Minga's hand but she swerved from him.