answered her.

"Oh, they think I 'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They 've got
the idea I 'm out o' date. And I 'm going to show 'em a thing or two
to wake 'em up."

"How?" asked the woman.

"By doing what their whole kid-glove gang have n't been able to do," he
avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly
relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his
kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that
Blake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk
end the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness.
It was as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She
accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her
chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that
lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or
two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists
look at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.

"You did n't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as
she paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.

"D' you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a
final and lingering study of it.

"I 'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her
eyes, he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small