“That’s comforting,” smiled Gail. “I have just been being all alone in the world, on the most absolutely deserted island of which you can conceive. Arly, sit down. I want to tell you something.”
The black hair and the brown hair cuddled close together, while Gail, her tongue once loosened, poured out in a torrent all the pent-up misery which had been accumulating within her for the past tempestuous weeks; and Arly, her eyes glistening with the excitement of it all, kept her exclamations of surprise and fright and indignation and horror, and everything else, strictly to such low monosyllables as would not impede the gasping narration.
“I’d like to kill him!” said Arly, in a low voice of startling intensity, and jumping to her feet she paced up and down the confines of the little stateroom. Among all the other surprises of recent events, there was none more striking than this vast change in the usually cool and sarcastic Arly, who had not, until her return from Gail’s home, permitted herself an emotion in two years. She came back to the bed with a sudden swift knowledge that Gail had been dry-eyed all through this recital, though her lips were quivering. She should have cried. Instead she was sitting straight up, staring at Arly with patient inquiry. She had told all her dilemma, and all her grief, and all her fear; and now she was waiting.
“The only way in which that person can be prevented from attacking your Uncle Jim, which would be his first step, is to attack him before he can do anything,” said Arly, pacing up and down, her fingers clasped behind her slender back, her black brows knotted, her graceful head bent toward the floor.
“He is too powerful,” protested Gail.
“That makes him weak,” returned Arly quickly. “In every great power there is one point of great weakness. Tell me again about this tremendously big world monopoly.”
Patiently, and searching her memory for details, Gail recited over again all which Allison had told her about his wonderful plan of empire; and even now, angry and humiliated and terror stricken as she was, Gail could not repress a feeling of admiration for the bigness of it. It was that which had impressed her in the beginning.
“It’s wonderful,” commented Arly, catching a trace of that spirit of the exultation which hangs upon the unfolding of fairyland; and she began to pace the floor again. “Why, Gail, it is the most colossal piece of thievery the world has ever known!” And she walked in silence for a time. “That is the thing upon which we can attack him. We are going to stop it.”
Gail rose, too.
“How?” she asked. “Arly, we couldn’t, just we two girls!”