Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party.  Elinor had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.

“I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab,” said the club-man in self-defense.  “And you mustn’t treat it lightly, either.  Ten prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David.”

“We are not very likely to babble,” retorted Penelope.  “We are not so rich in intimates in this aboriginal desert.”  But Elinor spoke to the penal clause in his warning.

“Then Mr. Kent’s danger is more real than he admitted?” she said.

“It’s real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another man in his place.  He is a curious combination, is David:  keen and sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it comes to the in-fighting he hasn’t sense enough to pound sand, as his New Hampshire neighbors would say.”

“I like that side of him best,” Penelope averred.  “Deliver me from a man of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult.  Mr. Loring tells a story of a transplanted Vermonter in South America.  A hot-headed Peruvian called him a liar, and he said:  ‘Oh, pshaw! you can’t prove it.’”

“What a merciless generalizer you are!” said Ormsby, laughing.  “The man who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill the requirements.”

“Won’t he?” said Penelope.  “I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it all out.”

They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor’s “Won’t you come in?” Ormsby said:  “It’s pretty late, but I’ll smoke a cigar on the porch, if you’ll let me.”

Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of Ormsby’s cigar.  After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the lapsed topic.

“I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent.  You described him exactly; and—­well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part.  Do you think he will take ordinary precautions?”

“I hope so, I’m sure,” rejoined the amateur chairman.  “As his business manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion.  I was glad to see Loring to-night—­glad he has come back.  Kent defers to him more than he does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort.”

“Yes,” she agreed; “I was glad, too.”

After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light over the roadway, and the occasional dap of one the great beetles darting hither and thither in the glare.

Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say months.