Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/24

 her mind, momentarily, to the vessels on the lake; whence it flew to a train westbound through the snow—to Jay Rountree.

She looked about and seeing that Di slept, she slipped a hand into a drawer and to the back of it, where Di would never explore for handkerchiefs or compacts and where Ellen hid her treasure. She drew forth a little leather case protecting a picture clipped from a newspaper long ago. He had been arrested in a raid upon a dance club where several college boys and girls had been "picked up" along with couples of another sort. The boys had given false names but Jay had been recognized and, when this picture had been taken, he had known he was in for it and was trying to smile it away. Ellen knew how little wrong he had done and how much blame he got for it; and she loved this picture best of all.

In the opposite side of the case, she had another, also cut from a newspaper. This showed him in an eight-oar shell on the Charles. She loved that, too; for it revealed his strong, slender arms and straight, strong shoulders and his neck slightly astrain from the stroke.

Ellen bathed, while the bedroom was becoming warm, and returned without disturbing Di. Before the pictures on her dresser, she let down her hair, which fell in a bronze-chestnut shower. She had lovely hair, thick and lustrous. When it was down, it made her look younger; she looked like a girl of sixteen with her slim, white legs, her small breasts and smooth arms and large gray eyes. When she wore a dark skirt and a blouse with long sleeves and high in the neck, and when her hair was coiled about