Page:The Trail Rider (1924).pdf/226

 sight of those women immediately to suggest her. Whether she had put it behind her and opened a new account, of course he did not know. One way or another she seemed to have put something between her and her past, or the worst of her past.

He felt that he owed Fannie a friendly turn if it ever should come his way to pay it, for he was convinced that the good in her had moved her to warn him that night at the peril of hard usage for herself. He doubted if they should ever meet again, for it was likely that those who had used her to entrap him had sent her away from that country, distrustful of her for any future employment in their schemes.

Mrs. Goodloe was in the hotel office knitting a necktie of scarlet silk when he returned from his aimless rambling. She held the finished portion of it up to Hartwell's view and admiration.

"It's for Ollie's birthday," she said. "Do you think it'll become him?"

"It will make him look like a prince, ma'am," he assured her, with entire gravity.

Mentally he pictured the flaming adornment over Mr. Noggle's pea-green shirt, beneath his salmonlike, shallow chin. He surely would be a figure to fascinate the female eye when he stepped out arrayed in that ardent example of his mother-in-law's art.