Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/258

238 shall personally see you through with it. You're going to stop making a fool of me."

"Tell me," pleaded Billy Magee. "Tell me who you are—what this is all about. Can t you see I'm working in the dark? You must—"

She threw open the card-room door.

"An English officer," she remarked loudly, stepping out into the other room, "taught the admiral the game. At least, so he said. It added so much romance to it in the eyes of the rocking-chair fleet. Can t you see—India—the hot sun—the Kipling local color—a silent, tanned, handsome man eternally playing solitaire on the porch of the barracks? Has the barracks a porch?"

Roused, humiliated, baffled, Mr. Magee felt his cheeks burn.

"We shall see what we shall see," he muttered.

"Why coin the inevitable into a bromide," she asked.

Mr. Magee joined the group by the fire. Never before in his life had he been so determined on anything as he was now that the package of money should return to his keeping. But how?