“And what,” demanded Teddie in the most businesslike tone of which she was capable, “will you expect me to pay you for this?” “Pay me?” repeated Gunboat Dorgan, wheeling about on her. “Who said anything about a purse in this bout? I’m not doin’ this for pay.” “Then what are you doing it for?” asked the slightly perplexed Teddie. “I’m doin’ it for _yuh_!” asserted Gunboat, leaning fraternally over the table-end. “I’ve that little club-roadster of my own,” the entirely unpractical Teddie rather feebly suggested, feeling the appropriateness of some effort to depersonalize the issue. “It wouldn’t be pay, of course. But when you and Ruby settle down in your flat it would be nice for running out into the country in hot weather. You’d take _that_, surely?” Gunboat essayed a hand-movement of repudiation which he’d seen quite often in the movies. He was warmly conscious, in fact, of an appeasing touch of the theatrical in this knight-errantry that had bobbed so unexpectedly up at the tail end of a humdrum morning of dub-drilling and bag-punching. “Noth-thing doin’!” he said with decision. “I get enough out of it when I see that stiff go to the mat. Yuh say he’s goin’ to horn in here at three o’clock. Well, I’ll breeze in at three-two, railroad time. And I’ll learn him to think twice before he flies that zooin’-bug around a girl who’s been born and bred a lady!” And even Teddie, as she stood up and shook hands with her new-found champion, was troubled by a vague yet persistent touch of theatricality about the situation as a whole. But she had made her decision, and she intended to stick to it. She watched Gunboat step to the door, with his hat in his hand, come to a stop, and then step back to the table-end. “Say,” he said with a slightly self-conscious and not altogether heroic look on his face, “don’t say anything to—to Miss Reamer about this, lady, if yuh don’t mind. It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide. But yuh know what women are!” And, with an even more fraternal nod of the head, he passed out through the door with his peculiarly light and panther-like tread, and was gone. CHAPTER SEVEN “Come in,” said Teddie, rather shakily. The bronze Moorish knocker on her studio-door had sounded ominously through the quietness, and even that second wind of courage which had come to her at the eleventh hour seemed to vanish before a sudden and rather breathless sense of impending culmination, not unlike that which once thrilled her childish body when an asbestos stage-curtain rolled up. For thirty tense minutes, indeed, Teddie had been doing her best to work on a sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight, slightly bewildered by the discovery that an ineradicable quaver in her fingers was giving uninvited Childe-Hassan vibrations to her lines. And now she had no need to look still again at her watch to become aware of the fact that it was exactly three minutes to three.