“That means you think it’s rotten.”
“No. But it isn’t finished and—I don’t know.”
“Well, I hate it.”
He turned away, sat down on a divan, and let his big knuckly hands drop down between his knees.
“Fact is, I haven’t got at the fellow’s secret,” he said meditatively. “I got a first impression—”
He paused.
“I know!” said Miss Van Tuyn, deeply interested. “You told me what it was.”
“The successful blackmailer. Yes. But now I don’t know. I can’t make him out. He’s the hardest nut to crack I ever came across.”
He moved his long lips from side to side three or four times, then pursed them up, lifted his small eyes, which had been staring between his feet at a Persian rug on the parquet in front of the divan, looked at Miss Van Tuyn, who was standing before him, and said:
“That’s why I sat up all night playing poker with him.”