Dick looked down at her critically. Her snow-white yachting costume, with its touches of delicate blue, seemed to make her a part of the blue sea and the blue sky, with their markings of white in foam and cloud, to enhance the delicate pallor of her cheeks, to throw into her brown eyes a trace of violet, to bring into relief, the rich colour of the brown hair which rippled about her face, straying where it could into wanton little ringlets, sometimes gold and sometimes almost red in the sun. She was so new a Gail to Dick that he was puzzled, and worried, too, for he felt, rather than saw, that some trouble possessed this dearest of his friends.
“Yes, it is big news,” he admitted; “big enough and startling enough to impress any one very gravely.” Then he shook his head at her. “But you mustn’t worry about it, Gail. You’re not responsible.”
Gail turned her eyes from him and looked out over the white-edged waves again.
“It is a tremendous responsibility,” she mused, whereupon Dick, as became him, violently broke that thread of thought by taking her arm and drawing her away from the rail, and walking gaily with her up to the forward shelter deck, where, shielded from the crispness of the wind, there sat, around the big table and amid a tangle of Sunday papers, Jim Sargent and the Reverend Smith Boyd, Arly and Gerald Fosland, all four deep in the discussion of the one possible topic of conversation.
“Allison’s explosion again,” objected Dick, as Gail and he joined the group, and caught the general tenor of the thought. “I suppose the only way to escape that is to jump off the Whitecap. Gail’s worse than any of you. I find she’s responsible for the whole thing.”
Arly and Gerald looked up quickly.
“I neither said nor intimated anything of the sort,” Gail reprimanded Dick, for the benefit of the Foslands, and she sat down by Arly, whereupon Dick, observing that he was much offended, patted Gail on the shoulder, and disappeared in search of Ted.
“I’d like to hand a vote of thanks to the responsible party,” laughed Jim Sargent, to whom the news meant more than Gail appreciated. “With Allison broke, Urbank of the Midcontinent succeeds to control of the A.-P., and Urbank is anxious to incorporate the Towando Valley in the system. He told me so yesterday.”
The light which leaped into Gail’s eyes, and the trace of colour which flashed into her cheeks, were most comforting to Arly; and they exchanged a smile of great satisfaction. They clutched hands ecstatically under the corner of the table, and wanted to laugh outright. However, it would keep.
“The destruction of Mr. Allison was a feat of which any gentleman’s conscience might approve,” commented Gerald Fosland, who had spent some time in definitely settling, with himself, the ethics of that question. “The company he proposed to form was a menace to the liberty of the world and the progress of civilisation.”