Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/164

154 been bewildering her, of late, more than she was ready to acknowledge.

"The things that have been happening around here," he had the brutality to retort, "the things I'm now trying to straighten out for you!"

And remembering those things, the sense of her desolation returned to her double-fold. She walked to the window, looked out, and then turned slowly about. She was neither obtuse nor unsympathetic; she was merely a girl who had been prodigiously preoccupied with her fight for freedom and the depressing discovery that it was a losing fight.

"Oh, Gerry, what's the matter with me, anyway?" she demanded with an altogether unlooked-for note of wistfulness in her voice.

"Don't you know?" he said as he followed her to the window. "Don't you know, you poor little muddle-headed kid?"

Teddie shook her head. She was rather foolishly afraid that Gerry was going to be sympathetic, and she didn't want that,