"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open, had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called up."
Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small extravagances in the refurnishing.
"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"
"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.
"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for that."
"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."
"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water. There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed. "That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend—allowing that anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all right!"
"How is that?" asked Griswold.
"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about to cut my throat, Griswold."
"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be told.