Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/203

 blind,” he smiled. “You can hide your light deep in the woods if you like, Miss Pomeroy, but I’ll make a beaten path to your door.”

Val jumped out of the car and walked with her around to the front entrance of the house.

“It’s just lunch time,” she announced. “You’ll stay, of course.”

Would he stay? He had to smile as he nodded to indicate his complaisance.

Lunch was gay. With the advent of Val the girl was able to cast off the blue restraint that had been on her spirit for the last two days, like a filmy pall that hampered without binding. Teck’s influence on her, she noticed, was at its lowest ebb when this new, strangely interesting man was there. They talked of many things; of a Turner sunset in the museum, Gauguin, Arnold Daly in “Candida,” they discovered a mutual love for big league baseball and for a rattling good detective story, with many murders and the mystery kept up to the last page, automobiles, Chaliapin—and thus by devious and round-about stages they came down to themselves and their business here, and Teck.

“Who told you I was down here?” she asked.

“Why, nobody—I just guessed it. About the money, I suppose,” he ventured. She nodded a little, gravely.

“I met Teck on the train, coming down,” he announced casually, attempting a nonchalance about this man’s name and presence that he by no means felt.

He could see the alarm flash into her eyes. In an instant her gay exterior was stripped from her like the mask it was; weighing heavily on her, always, was the menace of Teck; she forgot it sometimes, for a