"No—you won!" said a very small but very insistent voice by his side.
Hughie turned sharply. Miss Gaymer was breathing expansively upon the glass of the window, and assiduously scribbling a pattern thereon with her finger—an infantile and unladylike habit of which her nurse thought she had cured her at the age of eight. Also, her cheeks were aglow, and that with a richness of colouring which sufficed to convey some glimmerings of intelligence even into the brain of the obtuse young man beside her. Hughie suddenly felt something inside his head begin to buzz. His gigantic right hand (which still contained Jimmy Marrable's cheque tucked in between two fingers) closed cautiously but comprehensively upon Joan's left, which was resting on the window-frame, much as a youthful entomologist's net descends upon an unwary butterfly.
"Joey," he said unsteadily,—"Joey, what do you mean?"
Miss Gaymer sighed, in the resigned but persevering fashion of a patient Sunday-school teacher. Then she slipped her hand from under Hughie's, extracting as she did so the folded cheque from between his fingers. Hughie watched her dumbly.
Joan unfolded the cheque, and perused it in a valedictory sort of manner. Then she kissed it softly. Then she tore it up very slowly into small pieces.
She sighed again pensively, and said:—
"There goes my ransom! It's a wicked waste—of a cheque-stamp! Now," she added cheerfully, "I am compromised worse than ever. Hughie, dear, I really think, after this, that you'll have to—Ough! Hughie! Hughie!"
For blind, groping Hughie's eyes were open at last. With an exultant whole-hearted roar he initiated a sudden enveloping movement; and then, turning away from the fierce light that beats upon actions performed at a window, strode majestically (if rather top-heavily) towards a great leather sofa in a secluded corner beyond the fireplace. The scandalised Miss Gaymer, owing to circumstances over which she had no control, accompanied him.