“Oh, please go away,” said the weak-voiced girl, with a revulsion of feeling which left utter solitude the only thing to be desired. But Gunboat Dorgan had experienced his own revulsions of feeling. And he was flushed now with something more than victory. “Say, Ruby’s all right,” he confidentially acknowledged. “But this sure puts her in the discard. And what’s more, I’m glad things broke the way they did. I’m mighty glad it was _me_ you got to put this thing straight. And——” “I want to be alone,” moaned Teddie through her tear-wet fingers. “Of course yuh do,” acknowledged her new-found knight. “And yuh will be. But if I’m goin’ to hit those Long Island resorts in a li’l club-roadster when the hot weather comes, I’d like to think it’s goin’ to be _wit’ yuh_!” And before she quite realized what he meant Gunboat Dorgan had caught her up and kissed her on the tear-stained cheek. “Y’ understand don’t yuh!” he said, laughing a little triumphantly at the stricken light which came into her eyes. She stood up, dizzy, gathering her breath to say what she had to say. But he pushed her back gently into her chair, with a smile that was both a little shy and a little proprietary. Then he slipped out of the room with his light and panther-like step, leaving her with the bed-rock of existence no longer merely undulating, but fallen utterly away. CHAPTER EIGHT Since thinness of skin seems to stand an immediate though unhappy corollary to blueness of blood, Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, being an aristocrat, even if one under protest, found herself without that indurated armor which protects her humbler fellow-beings from the buffets and shocks of fate. So her spirit still winced at the thought of what she had passed through. Her body still alternately flushed with indignation and chilled with a tangle of fears. Something, she knew, was about to happen, was bound to happen. Yet what this was she had neither the power nor the inclination to fathom. She merely waited, sure only of the recurring waves of desolation which beat upon her soul. She even struggled to escape from this denuding loneliness, the next morning, by trying to lose herself in her work. But so small and trivial did that work now stand to her that it seemed like trying to bury her bruised and burning body in a bird-bath. Yet by both temperament and habit, she was averse to passivity. She hated the thought of sitting back in vague but enveloping apprehension of the unknown. She reached a point, in fact, where she would have been willing to see the blue deliver its bolt, where she would have welcomed, for the sheer relief of action, the end of that deluding interregnum of silence.