"The best man I've had
in years--except Wentworth," he murmured to himself. "And throwing
himself away--to be killed by a cold-blooded devil that nothing
human can catch--you're getting old, John Grogan--but, by Judas,
you can't blame him, can you? If you were a man in the prime like
him, by Judas, you'd be doing it yourself. And yet it'll go hard
--losing him--"
He turned back to his desk and his papers. But for some minutes he
could not pay attention to the papers. There was a shadow on them
--a shadow that blurred the typed letters--the shadow of
bat's wings.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INDOMITABLE MISS VAN GORDER
Miss Cornelis Van Gorder, indomitable spinster, last bearer of a
name which had been great in New York when New York was a red-roofed
Nieuw Amsterdam and Peter Stuyvesant a parvenu, sat propped up in
bed in the green room of her newly rented country house reading the
morning newspaper. Thus seen, with an old soft Paisley shawl tucked
in about her thin shoulders and without the stately gray
transformation that adorned her on less intimate occasions,--she
looked much less formidable and more innocently placid than those
could ever have imagined who had only felt the bite of her tart wit
at such functions as the state Van Gorder dinners. Patrician to her
finger tips, independent to the roots of her hair, she preserved, at
sixty-five, a humorous and quenchless curiosity in regard to every
side of life, which even the full and crowded years that already lay
behind her had not entirely satisfied.
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