"All!" Harrison managed to blurt, huskily, throwing his brows up in oaf-like protest, "all! Why, there's fifteen hundred dollars in that bunch!"
"Give it to me," repeated Daisy, clear-toned, "or else let me go."
Harrison was too far advanced in his midnight madness to accept the saner alternative. He thrust the roll of bills into her hand.
"Now take away your hands a minute," said Daisy Nixon. As Harrison, all his attention concentrated on the mastering impulse of the moment, half-involuntarily obeyed the brisk request, she sprang with a lightning movement off his knee and away.
"Now, Mr. Man," she said, "you just dare to lay a finger on me, or to try to get this money back, and I'll yell. Jean the cook is sleeping just overhead, and she'd be down here before you could say 'Jack Robi'son'."
At the change that came over Harrison's face, Daisy let loose the laugh that had been bobbing at her lips ever since the beginning of the encounter. She laughed until she sank into a chair helpless. She knew that Harrison had had the theory most men of his type held, that a man need only force a girl up to a certain point and her own answering passion would do the rest. She laughed so hard that she missed the gradations by which Sir Thomas Harrison passed from lust to wrath. When, finally, she straightened from her paroxysm, he was leaning forward, elbow on table, his chin thrust out ready for speech, and on his face a sneer—such a sneer!—Daisy had never imagined even Harrison could look so ugly!
"So-me little schemer!" he slid, out of the side of his mouth. Words came easily enough now. "But don't think you win—oh, no-o! D'ye know what I'm going to do, if you don't hand over that money?"
"Oh," Daisy stood up, tilting her head aside, and dimpling, "the money is all that's bothering you now, is it? I thought maybe you were going to say you were sorry."
"I'm mighty sorry," Harrison snarled, "that you got that good money in your thief's fist. That's all I'm sorry about. But, as I say, you're going to hand it over, an' you're a-going to hand it over quick. D'ye hear!"
"I hear," said the girl, "and I'm going to show you something now. Here's all I care for your dirty money."