“Still, you believe that Tregarvon isn’t going to win out?” persisted the golden youth.
Hartridge laughed.
“As Miss Richardia might put it, I haven’t any think coming to me, have I?” he parried.
Carfax gave it up. There was a point beyond which he could not press a man who was dipping with him into the common salt-dish, and he felt that the point had been reached.
“It is a pity you can’t stay and spend the evening with us, Mr. Hartridge,” he said, a little further along, when Uncle William came in to bare the table; but he added nothing to the conventional protest when the professor declared that he must go: on the contrary, he sped the parting guest so nimbly that Tregarvon was scarcely at his third pipe-filling when the purring of the yellow car’s motor announced Carfax’s return from Highmount.
“I told you so!” was the New Yorker’s first word, as he came in to take his place before the handful of fire on the dining-room hearth. “Where is my pipe?”
“What did you tell me?” queried Tregarvon, finding the pipe and pushing the tobacco within reach.
“That Hartridge knows, or thinks he knows, that you are on a false scent up yonder on the Pisgah cliffs: also, that he is deuced glad of it.”
“You can see farther into the millstone than I can, if you can draw any such conclusion as that,” Tregarvon remarked. “I thought he bluffed you good and plenty.”
“He did; and then again he didn’t. I insist that there is something doing, and that this mild-mannered gentleman who teaches mathematics and the natural sciences is in on it. I have just had an experience that was an eye-opener.”