He looked away thoughtfully; tempted, convinced, suspecting the source of her information, but wishing to remain ignorant.
"You are determined to buy?" She nodded energetically. "What does your father say?"
She seized his idea, saving him the embarrassment of a direct suggestion.
"If Dad says yes, will that convince you? Wait." She thought a moment, pacing up and down, humming brightly to herself. Suddenly she turned, her eyes sparkling with the delight of her own machinations. "I'll tell you how I'll do it. Next week's my birthday. I'll ask him to give me the tip as a birthday present." She clapped her hands gleefully, adding: "I'll tell him it's for my trousseau. If he says all right you won't refuse."
She flung herself joyfully into his arms at this victory won, at this prospect opened.
"Bojo, I do love you and I do want to do so much for you!" she cried, tightening her arms about his neck, with more genuine demonstration than she had shown in months.
"After all, I'd be a fool to refuse," he thought, excited too, and aloud he said, "Yes, Miss General Manager."
"Oh, call me anything you like if you'll only let me manage you!" she said, laughing. "Now sit down and let me tell you all I've planned out for you to do."
That night she told him excitedly over the telephone that her little scheme had succeeded, that her father had given his O. K., but of course no one must know. The next day he had bought five hundred shares for her, and after much hesitation a thousand for his own account at 104-1/2. It was a good risk; the stock had been stable for years; even if the combination did not go through, there was little danger of a rapid fall; and if it went up there was a chance at a thirty- or forty-point rise. He kept the injunction of secrecy, as all such injunctions are kept, to the point of telling only his closest friends, Marsh and DeLancy, who bought at once.
Nevertheless, no sooner had the transaction been completed than he had a sudden revulsion. He had been long enough in Wall Street to have heard a hundred tales of the methods of big manipulators. What if Dan Drake's endorsement was only a clever ruse to conceal his real intentions, quits for reimbursing Doris afterward with a check, according to a famous precedent? Perhaps he even suspected that he, Bojo, had put Doris up to it and was taking this method to read him the lesson that his methods were not to be solved along such lines. At any rate, Tom passed a very bad night, saying to himself that he had plunged ahead on the flimsiest sort of evidence and fully deserved a shearing.