Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/216

"Say! There isn't!"

"Yes there is. Jock told me so himself."

"Why, say, gee, but—" Bones was spluttering wildly in his excitement. "But he always vowed up and down he didn't have an idea why Brad crocked off! I bet I've asked him a thousand times!"

"Jock," said Mrs. Hamill quietly and proudly, "is sometimes very nearly too fine for this world. Of course this time he's been a fool. But rather an admirable fool. I declare, when he was telling me all this, I didn't know whether to kiss him or to slap him hard!" . . . Seeing Bones cross the room and begin to burrow into a closet purposefully, she added, "Yes, get it now, before he comes. I have no conscience whatever in this matter and I rejoice to perceive that you haven't either, but if Jock catches us at it——"

"Hell will pop," finished Bones concisely, emerging. He clutched the strong-box, an oblong tin receptacle bruised with dents and scratches. "Don't know where the key is, I'll have to break the lock."

"Do."

He laid the box, open, in Mrs. Hamill's lap, and she explored its contents with flying fingers. Verses, innumerable verses, scrawled in pencil on smudgy papers of divers sorts and sizes. Two little black notebooks. A snapshot of a laughing blonde in a canoe. A package of purple-inked billets-doux, eloquent of some last-year's love. A swollen envelope marked "Keep" with an elastic girdling its middle. A wedding invitation that bore the notation "Sic transit Gloria" in Jock's handwriting across the face of it. A sheaf of clippings from newspapers and magazines. A typewritten copy of a lecture on sex by Professor Somebody of Columbia University. An address book,