Mamise went on: "Mr. Larrey was here and he didn't know who Jake was till I told him how he helped you try to disarm Nicky. It will be a fine thing for poor Abbie and her children to remember that, won't it?" Davidge's heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the sweet purpose of Mamise's falsehood. "Yes, yes," he said. "I'll give Abbie a pension on his account." "That's beautiful of you!" And so it was done. It pleased a sardonic fate to let Jake Nuddle pose in his tomb as the benefactor he had always pretended to be. The operative, Larrey, had made many adverse reports against him, but in the blizzard of reports against hundreds of thousands of suspects that turned the Department of Justice files into a huge snowdrift these earlier accounts of Nuddle's treasonable utterances and deeds were forgotten. The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief space in the newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was all but forgotten. When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call upon Davidge in her wheeled chair, she found him strangely lacking in cordiality. She was bitterly hurt at first, until she gleaned from his manner that he was trying to remove himself gracefully from her heart because of his disability. She amazed him by her sudden laughter. He was always slow to understand why his most solemn or angry humor gave her so much amusement. While her nurse and his were talking at a little distance it pleased her to lean close to Davidge and tease him excruciatingly with a flirtatious manner. "Before very long I'm going to take up that bet we made." "What bet?" "That the next proposal would come from me. I'm going to propose the first of next week." "If you do, I'll refuse you." Though she understood him perfectly, it pleased her to assume a motive he had never dreamed of. "Oh, you mustn't think that I'm going to be an invalid for life. The doctor says I'll be as well as ever in a little while." Davidge could not see how he was to tell her that he didn't mean that without telling her just what he did mean. In his tormented petulance he turned his back on her and groaned. "Oh, go away and let me alone." She was laughing beyond the limits called ladylike as she began to wheel her chair toward the door. The nurse ran after her, asking: "What on earth?" Mamise assured, "Nothing on earth, but a lot in heaven," and would not explain the riddle. CHAPTER VII Davidge was the modern ideal of an executive. He appeared never to do any work. He kept an empty desk and when he was away no one missed him. He would not use a roll-top desk, but sat at a flat table with nothing on it but a memorandum-pad, a calendar, an "in" and an "out" basket, both empty most of the time.