“What’s the use being sore?” he asked. “It’s simple enough. You staked against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven’t you?”
Luella reached for her purse.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ll look. Haven’t you decided to steal it back yet?”
Sam laughed.
“I’m coming to that,” he said, “don’t hurry me.”
For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.
“Look here!” he said, “I’m no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can’t see you running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your hands.
“Give it to me,” he urged; “let me invest it for you. I’m a winner. I’ll double it for you in a year.”
The actress stared past Sam’s shoulder to where a group of young men sat about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her and laughed.
“As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel’s wife, looked to me,” he said. “I had to make you get out of my flower bed.”