As he had expected, his place at the dinner-table was some distance from hers. He was across the table from Jane and Graydon, and several seats removed from. David Cable. He smiled grimly and knowingly when he saw that he had been cut off cleverly from the Cables.
"To-morrow night, then, Jane!" said Graydon at parting. No one was near enough to catch the tender eagerness in his voice, nor to see the happy flush in her cheek as she called after him:
"To-morrow night!"
CHAPTER VIII — THE TELEGRAM
Bobby Rigby and Graydon Bansemer were bosom friends in Chicago; they had been classmates at Yale. It had been a question of money with Bobby from the beginning. According to his own admission, his money was a source of great annoyance to him. He was not out of debt but once, and then, before he fully realised it. So unusual was the condition, that he could not sleep; the first thing he did in the morning was to borrow right and left for fear another attack of insomnia might interfere with his training for the football eleven.
Robertson Ray Rigby, immortalised as Bobby, had gone in for athletics, where he learned to think and act quickly. He was called one of the lightest, but headiest quarterbacks in the East. No gridiron idol ever escaped his "Jimmy," or "Toppy," or "Pop," or "Johnny." When finally, he hung out his shingle in Chicago: "Robertson R. Rigby, Attorney-at-Law," he lost his identity even among his classmates. It was weeks before the fact became generally known that it was Bobby who waited for clients behind the deceptive shingle.
The indulgent aunt who had supplied him with funds in college was rich in business blocks and apartment buildings; and now, Mr. Robertson R. Rigby was her man of affairs. When he went in for business, the old push of the football field did not desert him. He was very much alive and very vigorous, and it did not take him long to "learn the signals."
With his aunt's unfaltering prosperity, his own ready wit and unbridled versatility, he was not long in establishing himself safely in his profession and in society. Everybody liked him, though no one took him seriously except when they came to transact business with him. Then, the wittiness of the drawing-room turned into shrewdness as it crossed the office threshold.