No further argument could avail to move her an iota from her position and the matter perforce rested, but when the two men were alone together, Ripley Halstead looked at his attorney with a troubled question in his eyes.
North nodded solemnly.
"It's blackmail!" he announced. "She's paying hush-money to someone and planning flight if the truth, whatever it may be, is discovered. Why else would she insist on retaining control of the money she considers peculiarly her own? I thought I had learned every detail of the past, and that her life was an open book, but you never can tell. There may have been some foolish romance or entanglement—"
"No." Halsted shook his head. "You're on the wrong track there, I'm sure of it. Willa is too high-minded to compromise herself, and level-headed enough to be safe from sentimental folly under any circumstances. If she had become involved in any difficulty, you can bank on it that she would come out with the truth, straight from the shoulder; she would be the last person in the world to allow herself to be intimidated. She may be being bled through pity or a mistaken sense of loyalty, but I don't see what we can do now to stop it."
"The first step will be to discover what her game is." The attorney chuckled ruefully. "To use her own parlance, Ripley, that young woman called my bluff, and her cards are high. Litigation would be a wearisome business and we couldn't buck her crowd down there. She'd have the executor, Baggott, appointed as trustee of the old gambler's estate, and he would be wax in her hands. We can only watch her, and try to prevent her doing anything foolishly quixotic."
The next day Willa paid her first visit to a famous modiste in Mrs. Halstead's company, and returned exhausted but impressed. The latent feminine instinct for adornment had taken possession of her and through the long evening she dreamed in a hazy rapture. The motive which had so far actuated her on her course was temporarily laid aside and in its stead came vague scenes of the future, when she should have learned how to carry those marvelous creations with the trained ease and elegance of Angelica, and was wholly transformed from the plain, awkward creature of the Limasito days. Perhaps, when Kearn Thode came to New York—
A sudden sound, subdued but unmistakably familiar, roused her from her reverie. What could it mean? She sprang from her chair and stood listening intently. The family were supposed to have gone to a dinner-party, yet from somewhere above had come a chorus of male laughter, and down the stairs to her opened door echoed the rattle and clink of poker chips.
Willa crept out to the hall wistfully, drawn by the well-remembered sound as by a magnet, and step by step ascended the stairs. A door at the left was ajar and through it came a warm ray of light and the odor of cigarettes.
"If that wasn't a hunch, I'll eat my shirt!" A buoyant voice exulted. "Stuck two raises before the draw and then filled an inside straight! What do you call it?"
"Lunacy, even if it did break for you," Vernon drawled. "You ought to be shot at sunrise. No more post-mortems. Ante up there, Cal."