And remembering those things, the sense of her desolation returned to her double-fold. She walked to the window, looked out, and then turned slowly about. She was neither obtuse nor unsympathetic; she was merely a girl who had been prodigiously preoccupied with her fight for freedom and the depressing discovery that it was a losing fight. “Oh, Gerry, what’s the matter with me, anyway?” she demanded with an altogether unlooked-for note of wistfulness in her voice. “Don’t you know?” he said as he followed her to the window. “Don’t you know, you poor little muddle-headed kid?” Teddie shook her head. She was rather foolishly afraid that Gerry was going to be sympathetic, and she didn’t want that, for sympathy, of late, seemed the inevitable overture to the unmusical opera of mushiness. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, Teddie,” asserted Gerry, wondering why she was refusing to meet his gaze. “You’re inflammatory without quite knowing it. You’re provocative, without being foolish enough to have fathomed the fact. The Lord made you so lovely, girl, that you put an ache in men’s hearts and a mist in front of their eyes. You make them forget themselves. And that’s why I’ve got to take you in hand.” “Take me in hand?” repeated Teddie, standing up very straight and white. “Yes, take you in hand,” repeated Gerry in turn. “I rather think I’ve something to say about that!” “Teddie, I’ve loved you all my life,” said Gerry, quite simply, disregarding even the abysmal scorn in her voice. “Then this is no time to tell me a thing like that,” she retorted with spirit. “And you’re wrong there,” contended Gerry, quite unmoved. “It’s the only, the essential time.” “What makes you feel that way about it?” asked Teddie, disturbed by the darkening light in his eye. “Because heaven only knows how long we can be alone here,” was his not altogether satisfactory reply. “I fail to see any particular advantage arising out of our—our temporary isolation,” retorted Teddie, with quite unexpected Johnsonian dignity. “Teddie!” was Gerry’s sharp cry as he towered over her. “Don’t you understand?” “Understand what?” asked the girl with the exasperatingly level gaze as she surveyed the none too steady hands which he was holding out toward her. “_That I can’t help kissing you!_” he abandonedly exclaimed as he just as abandonedly proceeded to do so. Teddie drew slowly away from him. He had seen children draw back, that way, from a milk-snake coiled up in a chocolate-box. Her eyes were blazing. “Now I know you’re no better than——” But that was as far as Teddie got. For the door was flung open and a protesting and much dishevelled Louis Lipsett was piloted into the room. He was piloted in without ceremony, and by the lapel of his overcoat. The hand that grasped that collar was Gunboat Dorgan’s, and the lines of his wide mouth were grim with determination.