Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/249

 invest one of the captain's cigarettes in a demand of real charity?"

Keen desire was scarcely veiled under Kimball's fiction of light patter. Smilingly the girl extended the case to him.

"Just to make it businesslike, the executrix demands your note for—um—sixty days, say. For one cigarette received, I promise to pay"

"Given!" He pulled a gold pencil from his pocket and made a pretense of writing the form on his cuff. Then he lit his borrowed cigarette and inhaled it gratefully.

"Your captain friend's straight from Egypt; I don't have to be told that," Willy Kimball murmured, in polite ecstasy. "At Shepard's, in Cairo, you'll get such a cigarette as this, and nowhere else in a barren world. The breath of the acanthus blossom—if it really has a breath—never heard."

"Back in Kewanee the Ladies' Aid Society will have you arrested," Kitty put in mischievously. "They're terribly wrought up over cigarettes—for minors."

Kimball cast her a glance of deep reproach.