Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/197

 as had confronted Ellen from Michigan Avenue shop windows when Lew had bid her to pick what she pleased.

"Like it?" questioned Di, with a touch of defiance and of wonder as she watched Ellen's face burn with a slow, deepening glow.

The heat, breaking the long winter-look over the lakes, increased also in the Caribbean and Lida became more communicative. Thrice only in more than two months had she written Jay, and each epistle had been no more than a memorandum of a mood.

"Here we are," she had inscribed from Santa Lucia. "Palms are appallingly overplayed. We switch the setting, but we're the same. There was a tail end of a hurricane yesterday, and we rode it out, where do you suppose? In the harbor."

The three had been like that and now arrived a cablegram from Caracas informing him that she was returning to New York, leaving him to guess at the time. Perhaps she did not know it, he thought; and the message did not make clear whether she stayed with her party or traveled independently. Then a radio arrived, supplying him with the due date of a mail boat, two days ahead.

It meant, plainly, that she wanted him to meet her, and he prepared to go east, without either opposition or approval from his father, except an offer to supply him with expenses, if he needed money.

"I don't," said Jay; for he had been saving and was not required, therefore, to apply to Ellen as upon the