Armstrong frowned. He realized that now he must either break his promise to her, or keep it. Some such emergency as this, some such threat of trouble, was just what she must have had in mind when she had extracted the promise. Business was no overwhelming mystery to her. Yet this letter from Seattle--nonsense! There was no trouble here. The whole thing was absurd. Nothing could come of this; there was no basis. And just now the important thing was to keep Dorothy's peace of mind secure and serene. "I wouldn't bother her now if the whole organization were collapsing--which it's not!" thought Armstrong. At four-thirty Jimmy Wren appeared beaming, and displayed a telegram from the Seattle sales manager, branding the report as wholly false. There was not a single dissatisfied investor in the coast territory, so far as was known. "Want to stop Macgowan?" asked Wren. "I can catch him at his office." "Let him go," said Armstrong. "If there's anything at all in this, he'd better ferret it out and kill it. You wire the Seattle manager to investigate Elmer Lewis. That letter looks queer to me. Let me know at Evansville what you learn." When Armstrong met Dorothy for dinner, he had dismissed the affair from his mind, and said nothing to her about it. CHAPTER VIII Christmas in Evansville to some degree reflected the warm holiday celebration of the South, which is not individual but general in scope, not personal but social; making up in its own way for the lack of snow and more vigorous Northern traditions. Dwindling stores of sherry and bourbon were opened with unreserved bounty, while "white mule" from across the river had its own share in affairs. Old recipes provided for egg-nogg, smooth as silk and strong as black-label Bacardi, or for fruit-cake whose fragrance was an almost forgotten memory, to be passed about by more skilled or fortunate housewives to others. In such matters Dorothy was busy almost from the moment of her arrival, for these delicately adjusted recipes were not left to the hands of servants. Armstrong found himself engulfed in a whirl of hospitality whose spontaneous gayety and open-hearted sincerity took him back to college days, and banished worry. Having heard nothing from Macgowan, he knew that all was well behind him, and forgot his troubles. Both Williams and Slosson came down over the holidays from Indianapolis, where their brokerage business was thriving, and called at the Deming residence. Their greeting to Armstrong was heartily cordial, and all the former ill feeling seemed past and forgotten. For this, Dorothy was grateful. Not that she particularly cared for either man, but she did want Armstrong's memories of Evansville to be untroubled by contact with any who were not warm-hearted friends. She need not have worried; Armstrong gave not a second thought to either Slosson or Ried Williams.