“Now don’t make fun of me,” she cried, gripping the bony old palm.
“And while you’re quietly turning this little trick,” he chuckled, “the Honourable Harrison Blake will be carefully watching every move of Elijah Stone, the best hippopotamus in the sleuth business, and be doing right smart of private snickering at the simplicity of womankind.”
She flushed, but added soberly:
“Of course it’s only a plan, and it may not work at all.”
They talked the scheme over in detail. At length, shortly before the hour at which the afternoon express from the East was due to arrive, Katherine retired to her own office. Half an hour later, looking down from her window, she saw the old surrey of Mr. Huggins’ draw up beside the curb, in it a quietly dressed, middle-aged passenger who had the appearance of a solid man of affairs. He crossed the sidewalk and a little later Katherine heard him enter Old Hosie’s office on the floor below. After a time she saw the stranger go out and drive around the Square to the Tippecanoe House, Peck’s hotel, where Katherine had directed that Mr. Manning be sent to facilitate his being detected by the enemy.
Her plan laid, Katherine saw there was little she could do but await developments—and in the meantime to watch Blake, which Mr. Mannings’ rôle would not permit his doing, and to watch and study Doctor Sherman. Despite this new plan, and her hopes in it, she realized that it was primarily a plan to defeat Blake’s scheme against the city. She still considered Doctor Sherman the pivotal character in her father’s case; he was her father’s accuser, the man who, she believed more strongly every day, could clear him with a few explanatory words. So she determined to watch him none the less closely because of her new plan—to keep her eyes upon him for signs that might show his relations to Blake’s scheme—to watch for signs of the breaking of his nerve, and at the first sign to pounce accusingly upon him.
When she reached home that afternoon she found Bruce awaiting her. Since morning, mixed with her palpitating love and her desire to see him, there had been dread of this meeting. In the back of her mind the question had all day tormented her, should she, for his own interests, send him away? But sharper than this, sharper a hundredfold, was the fear lest the difference between their opinions should come up.
But Bruce showed no inclination to approach this difference. Love was too new and near a thing for him to wander from the present. For this delay she was fervently grateful, and forgetful of all else she leaned back in a big old walnut chair and abandoned herself completely to her happiness, which might perhaps be all too brief. They talked of a thousand things—talk full of mutual confession: of their former hostility, of what it was that had drawn their love to one another, of last night out in the storm. The spirits of both ran high. Their joy, as first joy should be, was sparkling, effervescent.
After a time she sat in silence for several moments, smiling half-tenderly, half-roguishly, into his rugged, square-hewed face, with its glinting glasses and its chevaux de frise of bristling hair.
“Well,” he demanded, “what are you thinking about?”