CHAPTER VIIGARRY SEES A WALL AHEAD
“Why, what under the sun! How didhecome to know about it?” demanded Tavia. “Goodness!”
“He—he maybe—had something to do with recovering it for you,” Dorothy said faintly. Yet in her heart she knew that it was hope that suggested the idea, not reason.
“Well, I am going to find out right now,” declared Tavia Travers, and she marched back to the clerk’s desk before Dorothy could object, had she desired to.
“This note to my friend is from Mr. Knapp, who is stopping here,” Tavia said to the young man behind the counter. “Did he have anything to do with getting back my bag?”
“I know nothing about your bag, Miss,” said the clerk. “I was not on duty, I presume, when it was handed in. You are Miss——”
“Travers.”
The clerk went to the safe and found a memorandum, which he read and then returned to the desk.
“Your supposition is correct, Miss Travers. Mr. Knapp handed in the handbag and took a receipt for it.”
“When did he do that?” asked Tavia, quickly, almost overpowered with amazement.
“Some time during the night. Before I came on duty at seven o’clock.”
“Well! isn’t that the strangest thing?” Tavia said to Dorothy, when she rejoined her friend at the hotel entrance after thanking the clerk.
“How ever could he have got it in the night?” murmured Dorothy.
“Say! he’s all right—Garry Knapp is!” Tavia cried, shaking the bag to which she now clung so tightly, and almost on the verge of doing a few “steps of delight” on the public thoroughfare. “I could hug him!”
“It—it is very strange,” murmured Dorothy, for she was still very much disturbed in her mind.
“It’s particularly jolly,” said Tavia. “And I am going to—well, thank him, at least,” as she saw her friend start and glance at her admonishingly, “just the very first chance I get. But I ought to hug him! He deservessomereward. You said yourself that perhaps I should reward the finder.”
“Mr. Knapp could not possibly have been the finder. The bag was merely returned through him.” Dorothy spoke positively.
“Don’t care. I must be grateful to somebody,” wailed Tavia. “Don’t nip my finer feelings in the bud. Your name should be Frost—Mademoiselle Jacquesette Frost! You’re always nipping me.”
Dorothy, however, remained grave. She plainly saw that this incident foretold complications. She had made up her mind that she and Tavia would have nothing more to do with the Westerner, Garry Knapp; and now her friend would insist on thanking him—of course, she must if only for politeness’ sake—and any further intercourse with Mr. Knapp would make the situation all the more difficult.
She wished with all her heart that their shopping was over, and then she could insist upon taking the train immediately out of New York, even if she had to sink to the abhorred subterfuge of playing ill, and so frightening Tavia.
She wished they might move to some other hotel; but if they did that an explanation must be made to Aunt Winnie as well as to Tavia. It seemed to Dorothy that she blushed all over—fairlyburned—whenever she thought of discussing her feelings regarding Garry Knapp.
Never before in her experience had Dorothy Dale been so quickly and so favorably impressed by a man. Tavia had joked about it, but she by no means understood how deeply Dorothy felt.And Dorothy would have been mortified to the quick had she been obliged to tell even her dearest chum the truth.
Dorothy’s home training had been most delicate. Of course, in the boarding school she and Tavia had attended there were many sorts of girls; but all were from good families, and Mrs. Pangborn, the preceptress of Glenwood, had had a strict oversight over her girls’ moral growth as well as over their education.
Dorothy’s own cousins, Ned and Nat White, though collegians, and of what Tavia called “the harum-scarum type” like herself, were clean, upright fellows and possessed no low ideas or tastes. It seemed to Dorothy for a man to make the acquaintance of a strange girl on the street and talk with her as Garry Knapp seemed to have done, savored of a very coarse mind, indeed.
And all the more did she criticise his action because he had taken advantage of the situation of herself and her friend and “picked acquaintance” in somewhat the same fashion with them on their entrance into New York.
He was “that kind.” He went about making the acquaintance of every girl he saw who would give him a chance to speak to her! That is the way it looked to Dorothy in her present mood.
She gave Garry Knapp credit for being a Westerner and being not as conservative as Easternfolk. She knew that people in the West were freer and more easily to become acquainted with than Eastern people. But she had set that girl down as a common flirt, and she believed no gentleman would so easily and naturally fall into conversation with her as Garry Knapp had, unless he were quite used to making such acquaintances.
It shamed Dorothy, too, to think that the young man should go straight from her and Tavia to the girl.
That was the thought that made the keenest wound in Dorothy Dale’s mind.
They shopped “furiously,” as Tavia declared, all the morning, only resting while they ate a bite of luncheon in one of the big stores, and then went at it again immediately afterward.
“The boys talk about ‘bucking the line’ about this time of year—football slang, you know,” sighed Tavia; “but believe me! this is some ‘bucking.’ I never shopped so fast and furiously in all my life. Dorothy, you actually act as though you wanted to get it all over with and go home. And we can stay a week if we like. We’re having no fun at all.”
Dorothy would not answer. She wished they could go home. It seemed to her as though New York City was not big enough in which to hide away from Garry Knapp.
They could not secure seats—not those theywanted—for the play Ned and Nat had told them to see, for that evening; and Tavia insisted upon going back to the hotel.
“I am done up,” she announced. “I am a dish-rag. I am a disgrace to look at, and I feel that if I do not follow Lovely Lucy Larriper’s advice and relax, I may be injured for life. Come, Dorothy, we must go back to our rooms and lie down, or I shall lie right down here in the gutter and do my relaxing.”
They returned to the hotel, and Dorothy almost ran through the lobby to the elevator, she was so afraid that Garry Knapp would be waiting there. She felt that he would be watching for them. The note he had written her that morning proved that he was determined to keep up their acquaintanceship if she gave him the slightest opening.
“And I’ll never let him—never!” she told herself angrily.
“Goodness! how can you hurry so?” plaintively panted Tavia, as she sank into the cushioned seat in the elevator.
All the time they were resting, Dorothy was thinking of Garry. He would surely be downstairs at dinner time, waiting his chance to approach them. She had a dozen ideas as to how she would treat him—and none of them seemed good ideas.
She was tempted to write him a note in answer to the line he had left with the clerk for her that morning, warning him never to speak to her friend or herself again. But then, how could she do so bold a thing?
Tavia got up at last and began to move about her room. “Aren’t you going to get up ever again, Doro?” she asked. “Doesn’t the inner man call for sustenance? Or even the outer man? I’m just crazy to see Garry Knapp and ask him how he came by my bag.”
“Oh, Tavia! I wish you wouldn’t,” groaned Dorothy.
“Wish I wouldn’t what?” demanded her friend, coming to her open door with a hairbrush in her hand and wielding it calmly.
Dorothy “bit off” what she had intended to say. She could not bring herself to tell Tavia all that was in her mind. She fell back upon that “white fib” that seems first in the feminine mind when trouble portends:
“I’vesucha headache!”
“Poor dear!” cried Tavia. “I should think you had. You ate scarcely any luncheon——”
“Oh, don’t mention eating!” begged Dorothy, and she really found she did have a slight headache now that she had said so.
“Don’t you want your dinner?” cried Tavia, in horror.
“No, dear. Just let me lie here. You—you go down and eat. Perhaps I’ll have something light by and by.”
“That’s what the Esquimau said when he ate the candle,” said Tavia, but without smiling. It was a habit with Tavia, this saying something funny when she was thinking of something entirely foreign to her remark.
“You’re not going to be sick, are you, Doro?” she finally asked.
“No, indeed, my dear.”
“Well! you’ve acted funny all day.”
“I don’t feel a bit funny,” groaned Dorothy. “Don’t make me talk—now.”
So Tavia, who could be sympathetic when she chose, stole away and dressed quietly. She looked in at Dorothy when she was ready to go downstairs, and as her chum lay with her eyes closed Tavia went out without speaking.
Garry Knapp was fidgeting in the lobby when Tavia stepped out of the car. His eye brightened—then clouded again. Tavia noticed it, and her conclusion bore out the thought she had evolved about Dorothy upstairs.
“Oh, Mr. Knapp!” she cried, meeting him with both hands outstretched. “Tell me! How did you find my bag?”
And Garry Knapp was impolite enough to put her question aside for the moment while he asked:
“Where’s Miss Dale?”
Two hours later Tavia returned to her chum. Garry walked out of the hotel with his face heavily clouded.
“Just my luck! She’s a regular millionaire. Her folks have got more money than I’ll ever evenseeif I beat out old Methuselah in age! And Miss Tavia says Miss Dale will be rich in her own right. Ah, Garry, old man! There’s a blank wall ahead of you. You can’t jump it in a hurry. You haven’t got thespring. And this little mess of money I may get for the old ranch won’t put me in Miss Dorothy Dale’s class—not by a million miles!”
He walked away from the hotel, chewing on this thought as though it had a very, very bitter taste.