“Glimmering gosh, Colonel!” protested Val, as he hurried to pick up Gresham, laughing, however, as did the others, on account of the neighbors.  “Why did you do that?”

“I thought Johnny Gamble pushed him,” humbly apologized the colonel.

Bruce Townley and the Courtney girls arrived, and in the gay scramble for wraps Johnny had a moment with Constance.

“Well, I lose,” he said regretfully.  “There isn’t much chance to make that million between now and four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”

“What’s the difference?” inquired Constance, smiling contentedly into his eyes.

Only the presence of so many people prevented her fichu from being mussed.

“There’s a lot of difference,” he asserted with a suddenly renewed impulse, the world being greatly changed since she had refused Gresham.  “I set out to get it, and I won’t give it up until four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”

“If you want it so very badly I hope that you get it then,” she gently assured him.

Her shoulder happened to touch his arm and he pressed against it as hard as he could.  She resisted him.

“Ready, Constance?” called Polly.

“In just a minute,” Johnny took it on himself to reply.  “How does the score board look by this time?”

Constance hesitated, then she blushed and drew from a drawer of the library table the score board.  The neatly ruled pasteboard had been roughly torn into seven pieces—­but it had been carefully pasted together again!

CHAPTER XXIII

In which the bright eyes of Constance “Rain influence”

There being no cozy corners aboard Mr. Courtney’s snow-white Albatross in which a couple with many important things to say could be free from prying observation, Johnny and Constance behaved like normal human beings who were profoundly happy.  They mingled with the gaiety all the way out through the harbor to the open sea, and then they drifted unconsciously farther and farther to the edge of the hilarity, until they found themselves sitting in the very prow of the foredeck with Mr. Courtney and his friend from the West.  If they could not exchange important confidences they could at least sit very quietly, touching elbows.

Mr. Courtney’s friend from the West was a strong old man with keen blue eyes, who sat all through the afternoon in the same place, talking in low tones with Courtney on such dry and interminable subjects as railroads, mines, freight rates, stocks, bonds and board meetings.

Constance wondered how an otherwise nice old man could reach that age without having accumulated any lighter and more comprehensible objects of interest, and she really doubted the possibility of any man’s understanding all the dry-as-dust business statistics with which he was so handy.  Suddenly, however, Johnny Gamble awoke from his blissful lethargy and bent eagerly forward.