“Yes?” she commented, with a lifting of the eyebrows and a slight distention of the eyes. “That’s interesting. Have you made up your mind as to what type I am?”
“No, not quite yet. But if you’re the type I think you are, you’re very clever. I’ll have to hand you the palm on that score.”
“Really, you puzzle me,” she said seriously. “Truly, you do. I don’t understand you at all. What is it you are talking about? If it’s anything that has any sense in it I wish you’d say it out plain, and if not I wish you wouldn’t say it at all.”
Gregory stared. There was an odd ring of defiance in her voice.
“Please don’t be angry, will you?” he said, slightly disconcerted. “I’m just teasing, not talking sense.”
She arose and walked off, while he strolled up and down the veranda looking for Blount. When he found him, he narrated his experience.
“Well, it’s just possible that we are mistaken. You never can tell. Give her a little more rope. Something’s sure to develop soon.”
And thereafter it seemed as if Mrs. Skelton and some others might be helping her in some subtle way about something, the end or aim of which he could not be quite sure. He was in no way disposed to flatter himself, and yet it seemed at times as if he were the object of almost invisible machinations. In spite of what had gone before, she still addressed him in a friendly way, and seemed not to wish to avoid him, but rather to be in his vicinity at all times.
A smug, dressy, crafty Jew of almost minute dimensions arrived on the scene and took quarters somewhere in the building, coming and going and seeming never to know Mrs. Skelton or her friends, and yet one day, idling across some sand dunes which skirted an adjacent inlet, he saw them, Imogene and the ant-like Jew, walking along together. He was so astounded that he stopped in amazement. His first thought was to draw a little nearer and to make very sure, but realizing, as they walked slowly in his direction, that he could not be mistaken, he beat a hasty retreat. That evening Blount was taken in on the mystery, and at dinner time, seeing the Hebrew enter and seat himself in state at a distant table, he asked casually, “A newcomer, isn’t he?”
Mrs. Skelton, Imogene, and the one broker present, surveyed the stranger with curious but unacquainted indifference.