The grumbler scowled at his too penetrant crony. Saxe looked up from a sheet of foolscap, covered in the minute handwriting of the miser with long columns of figures by which were set forth details of the expenditures for a month in the matter of postage. He, too, paused, welcoming any diversion from the uncongenial labor, and lighted a cigarette with manifest relief.
“Be in whose place, Dave?” he questioned, idly.
Roy attempted a distraction from the topic.
“Huh!” he sneered. “This adventure isn’t what it’s been cracked up to be—no gore, no gold, no anything, except a parcel of musty papers. I have just finished the thrilling items of tenpenny nails in the matter of shingling the cottage; I suppose that poor old miser had a spasm every time he paid for a pound of them. In fact, I’m sure of it, because I get psychosympathetically those same spasms in going over the charges.”
“Psychosympathetically is good,” David generously declared. Then, he turned to Saxe. “Roy just saw Masters out for a walk with the girls, and it stirred him to envy, naturally enough. It did me, too, for there are certainly two unusually nice girls.”
Roy’s gloomy face lighted in an instant, marvelously. His eyes grew very blue and soft, his lips curved in the smile that made all women like him.
“Peaches!” he ejaculated, with candid enthusiasm. “But what a revelation it was when little Miss Thurston took off her spectacles. A demure angel appeared where before had been a dumpy New England schoolmarm.... I have discovered the important fact that spectacles on a short woman take exactly two inches from her height.”
“Have you informed Miss Thurston of your interesting discovery?” David inquired.
“Not yet,” was the answer; “but I shall, at the first opportunity. It’s a crime for any woman not to be as beautiful as she possibly can, every moment of her life. Think of the wholesome happiness that loveliness gives to every observer!”
“Except the other women,” Saxe suggested.