Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be gained by further delay.
By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and for croquet over lawn tennis.
Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons, when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone inthe living-rooms of the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.
Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes, springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry Jove of the north. In the doctor's front yard the grass was vividly green, gladioli and jonquils bordered the path with a bravery of color, and the buds of the clambering rose on the porch trellis were swelling to burst their calyxes.
Broffin turned in from the sidewalk and closed the gate noiselessly behind him. If he saw the bravery of colors in the path borders it was only with the outward eye. There was a faint stir on the porch, as of some one parting the leafy screen to look out, but he neither quickened his pace nor slowed it. While he had been three doors away in the lake-fronting street, a small pocket binocular had assured him that the young woman he was going to call upon was sitting in a porch rocker behind the clambering rose, reading a book.
She had risen to meet him by the time he had mounted the steps, and he knew that her first glance was appraisive. He had confidently counted upon being mistaken for a strange patient in search of the doctor, and he was not disappointed.
"You are looking for Doctor Farnham?" she began. "He is at his office—201 Main Street."
Broffin was digging in his pocket for a card. It was not often that he was constrained to introduce himself formally, and for an awkward second or two the search was unrewarded. When he finally found the bit of pasteboard he was explaining verbally.
"I know well enough where your father's office is, but you are the one I wanted to see," he said; and he gave her the round-cornered card with its blazonment of his name and employment.
He was watching her narrowly when she read the name and its underline, and the quick indrawing of the breath and the little shudder that went with it were not thrown away upon him. But the other signs; the pressing of the even teeth upon the lower lip and the coming and going of three straight lines between the half-closed eyes were not so favorable.
"Will you come into the house, Mr.——" she had to look at the card again to get the name—"Mr. Broffin?" she asked.
"Thank you, Miss; it's plenty good enough out here for me if it is for you," he returned, beginning to fear that the common civilities were giving her time to get behind her defences.
She made way for him on the porch and pointed to a chair, which he took, damning himself morosely when he caught his foot in the porch rug and knocked the book from its resting-place on the railing.
"It is no matter," she said, when he would havegone outside to recover the book; but he knew from that moment that whatever advantage a fair beginning may give was gone beyond recall.
"I guess we can take it for granted that you know what I want, Miss Farnham," he began abruptly, when he had shifted his chair to face her rocker. "Something like three months ago, or thereabouts, you went into a bank in New Orleans to get a draft cashed. While you were at the paying teller's window a robbery was committed, and you saw it done and saw the man that did it. I've come to get you to tell me the man's name."
If he had thought to carry the defences by direct assault he was quickly made to realize that it could not be done. Miss Farnham's self-possession was quietly convincing when she said:
"I have told it once, in a letter to Mr. Galbraith."
Broffin nodded. "Yes; in a letter that you didn't sign: we'll come to that a little later. The name you gave was John Wesley Gavitt, and you knew that wasn't his right name, didn't you?"
She made the sign of assent without thinking that it might imply the knowing of more.
"It was the name under which he was enrolled in theBelle Julie'screw, and it was sufficient to identify him," she countered; adding: "It did identify him. The officers found him and arrested him at St. Louis."
"Yes; and he made his get-away in about fifteen minutes after they had nabbed him, as you probably read in the papers the next morning. He's looseyet, and most naturally he ain't signing his name 'Gavitt' any more whatever. I've come all the way from New Orleans, and a whole heap farther, to get you to tell me his real name, Miss Farnham."
"Why do you think I can tell you?" was the undisturbed query.
"A lot of little things," said the detective, who was slowly coming to his own in the matter of self-assurance. "In the first place, he spoke to you in the bank, and you answered him. Isn't that so?"
She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's wicket.
"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the steamboat's books, wasn't it?—what?"
She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.
"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me—his real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."
In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the measuring of his own wit against the subtlecleverness of criminals. Therefore she accepted the challenge.
"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very justly that it was never any affair of mine."
Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men; but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a woman lay in an appeal to her fears.
"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's real name in it. You—you and him—fixed it up between you so that you could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me—that you'd done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law says——"
"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding your criminal."
Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the house wall was too close behind him.
"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't tell his real name—what?" he grated.
"You still think I could tell you that, if I chose?"she said, wilfully misleading him, or at least allowing him to mislead himself.
"I don't think anything about it: Iknow! You'd met him somewhere before that day in the bank—before you knew he was goin' to turn gentleman hold-up. That's why you don't want to give up his real name."
She had risen in answer to the distant chatter of an electric bell, and in self-defence, Broffin had to grope on the floor for his hat and stand up, too.
"I think my aunt is calling and I shall have to go in," she said, calmly dismissing him. "You'll excuse me, I am sure, Mr. Broffin."
"In just one second, Miss Farnham. Ain't you goin' to tell me that fellow's name?"
"No."
"Wait a minute. I'm an officer of the law, and I could arrest you and take you to New Orleans on what evidence I've got. How about that?—what?"
There was good fighting blood on the Farnham side, notwithstanding the kindly Doctor Bertie's peaceful avocation, and the calm gray eyes that met Broffin's were militantly angry when the retort came.
"If I had a brother, Mr. Broffin, he would be able to answer you better than I can!" she flamed out. "Let me pass, please!"
It was not often that Broffin lost his head or his temper, but both were gone when he struck back.
"That'll be all right, too!" he broke out harshly, blocking the way to force her to listen to him. "Youthink you've bluffed me, don't you?—what? Let me tell you: some fine day this duck whose name isn't Gavitt will turn up here—to see you; then I'll nab him. If you find out where he is, and write to him not to come, it'll be all the same; he'll come anyway, and when he does come, I'll get him!"
When Miss Farnham had gone in and there was nothing left for him to do but to compass his own disappearance, Broffin went away, telling himself with many embellishments that for once in his professional career he had made an ass of himself. He had made a sorry botch of a measurably simple detail, to say nothing of letting his temper push him into the final foolish boast which might easily defeat him.
None the less, he was able to set some few gains over against the one critical loss—if one may be said to lose what he has never had. Failing to learn the true name and place of the Bayou State Security robber, he told himself that he had established beyond question the correctness of his hypothesis. The doctor's daughter knew the man; she had known him before the robbery; she was willing to be his accomplice to the extent of her ability. There was only one explanation of this attitude. In Broffin's wording of it, Miss Farnham was "gone on him," if not openly, at least to such an extent as to make her anxious to shield him.
That being the case, Broffin set it down as a fact as good as accomplished that the man would sooneror later come to Wahaska. The detective's knowledge of masculine human nature was as profoundly acute as the requirements of his calling demanded. With a woman like Miss Farnham for the lure, he could be morally certain that his man would some time fling caution, or even a written prohibition, to the winds, and walk into the trap.
This misfire of Broffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.
That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting up of the items on the page of events.
For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary summer vacation, which—the fatesintervening—he had this time determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.
For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the desk-end.
A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone, chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den, there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her that it was no matter—that he merely wanted to let her know that he was going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late patient, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.
The mention of Griswold's name reminded Raymer of his own affair, and he became suddenlyanxious to have the connection with the Widow Holcomb's house renewed. When the crossed wire was plugged out, Griswold was ready and waiting.
"I was afraid you might be out somewhere, and I want to have a pow-wow with you," said Raymer, when the reassuring voice came over the wire. "Can you give me a little time if I drive around?" And when the prompt assent came: "All right; thank you. I'll be with you in a pair of minutes."
Raymer's horse was only a short half-square away, hitched in front of the Winnebago House, and he went to get it. But at the instant of unhitching, Miss Grierson's trap was driven up and the untying of knots paused while he stepped from the curb to stand at the wheel of the modish equipage.
"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an age—only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in public much oftener than you do."
"I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer, good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor Bertie's to-night."
The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being amere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding.
"When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer was free to keep his appointment with Griswold.
All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into the shafts and shouted.
When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a man-hunter and his quarry—a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm for the man-hunter himself.
One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had so nearlyrun him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.
"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing of the idlest curiosity.
"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant editor of theDaily Wahaskan, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear."
"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.
"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the ear-marks of a business man."
"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson—merely to make talk, as Dahlgren decided.
"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other night, and Sheffield—he's from Kentucky, you know—thought he remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of down in his home State."
"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By thistime Miss Margery's curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at first.
"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"
Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one arm.
"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.
"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."
Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it dexterously.
"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you. That's all."
During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found himself entering upon a new world—a world corresponding with gratifying fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking hours of his first night on the main-deck of theBelle Julie.
Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps, but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee Street was all that could be desired.
When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past, he found that in some mysterious manner his fame hadpreceded him. Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities; to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and beneficiary—which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good graces of his fellow-townsmen.
Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner, everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase, "well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credited to Margery. Beyond a hint to Raymer, he had told no one of the comfortable assurance against want lying snugly secure in the small strong-box in the Farmers' and Merchants' safety vault, and he was reasonably certain that Raymer could not have passed the hint so fast and so far as the town-wide limits to which the fact of the "well-fixed" phrase had spread.
All this was very nourishing, not to say stimulating, to the starved soul of a proletary. Not in any period of the past had he so fully understood that an acute appreciation of the wrongs of the race is no bar to an equally acute hungering and thirsting after the commonplace flesh-pots, or to a very primitive and soul-satisfying enjoyment of the same when they were to be had. Nevertheless, the reaction into self-indulgence proved to be only temporary. God had been good to him, enabling him to realize in miraculous fulfilment the ideal environment and opportunity:therefore he would do his part, proclaiming the holy war and fighting, single-handed if need be, the battle of the weak against the strong.
So ran the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of theBelle Julie. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the weight of it would give him the casting vote in all questions involving the rights of the workers. It was absurdly simple, and he wondered that none of the sociological reformers whose books he had read had anticipated him in the discovery of such an obviously logical point of attack.
With the re-writing of the book fairly begun, he was already looking about for the practical opportunity when the growing friendship with Edward Raymer promised to offer an opening exactly fulfilling the experimental requirements. Raymer had over-enlarged his plant and was needing more capital. So much Griswold had gathered from the talk of the street; and some of Raymer's half-confidences had led him to suspect that the need was, or was likely to become, imperative. It was only the finer quality of friendship that had hitherto kept him from offering help before it was asked, and thus far he had contented himself with hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of viewa partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained; and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting. Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the appointment for a meeting at the house in Shawnee Street.
"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open, had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called up."
Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small extravagances in the refurnishing.
"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"
"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.
"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for that."
"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."
"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water. There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed. "That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend—allowing that anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all right!"
"How is that?" asked Griswold.
"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about to cut my throat, Griswold."
"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be told.
"It begins back a piece, but I'll brief it for you. I suppose you've been told how Grierson came here a few years ago with a wad of money and a large and healthy ambition to own the town?"
Griswold nodded.
"Well, he has come pretty close to making a go of it. What he doesn't own or control wouldn't make much of a town by itself. A year ago he tried to get a finger into my little pie. He wanted to reorganize the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and offered to furnish the additional capital andtake fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock. Naturally, I couldn't see it. My father had left the plant as an undivided legacy to my mother, my sister, and myself; and while we haven't been getting rich out of it, we've managed to hold our own and to grow a little. Don't let me bore you."
"You couldn't do that if you should try. Go on."
"This spring Wahaska began to feel the boost of the big crop year. Everything was on the upward slant, and I thought we ought to move along with other people. Before the snow was off the ground we had hit the capacity limit in the old plant and the only thing to do was to enlarge. I borrowed the money at Grierson's bank and did it."
"And you can't make the enlarged plant pay?"
"Oh, yes, it's paying very well, indeed; we're earning dividends, all right. But in the money matter I simply played the fool and let Grierson cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars, and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year or more, and he didn't object."
"This was all in conversation?" said Griswold: "no writing?"
Raymer made a wry face.
"Don't rub it in. I'm admitting that I was all the different kinds of a fool. There was no definite time limit mentioned. I was to give my personalnotes and put up the family stock as collateral. A day or two later, when I went around to close the deal, the trap was standing wide open for me and a baby might have seen it. Grierson said he had proposed the loan to his directors, and that they had kicked on taking the stock as collateral. He said they wanted a mortgage on the plant."
Griswold nodded. "Which brought on more talk," he suggested.
"Which brought on a good bit more talk. Really, it didn't make any intrinsic difference. Stock collateral or property collateral, the bank would have us by the throat until the debt should be paid. But you know how women are: my mother would about as soon sign her own death warrant as to put her name on a mortgage; so there we were—blocked. Grierson was as smooth as oil; said he wanted to help me out, and was willing to stretch his authority to do it. Then he sprung the trap."
"Having got you just where he wanted you," put in the listener.
"Yes; having got me down. The new proposition was apparently a mere modification of the first one. I was an accredited customer of the bank, like other business men of the town, and as such I could ask for an extension of credit on accommodation paper, and Grierson, as president, was at liberty to grant it if he saw fit. He offered to take my paper without an endorser if I would cover his personal risk with my stock collateral, assigning it, not to the bank, but to him. I fell for it like a woollysheep. The stock transfers were made, and I signed a note for one hundred thousand dollars, due in sixty days; Grierson explaining that two months was the bank's usual limit on accommodation paper—which is true enough—but giving me to understand that a renewal and an extension of time would be merely a matter of routine."
Griswold was shaking his head sympathetically. "I can guess the rest," he said. "Grierson is preparing to swallow you whole."
"He has as good as done it," was the dejected reply. "The note falls due to-morrow; and, as I happened to be uptown this afternoon, I thought I would drop in and pay the discount and renew the paper. To tell the truth, I'd been getting more nervous the more I thought of it; and I didn't dare let it go to the final moment. Grierson shot me through the heart. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about some bank examiner's protest, and told me I must be prepared to take up the paper to-morrow. He knew perfectly well that he had me by the throat. I had checked out every dollar of the loan, and a good bit of our own balance in addition, paying the building and material bills."
"Of course you reminded him of his agreement?"
"Sure; and he sawed me off short: said that any business man borrowing money on accommodation paper knew that it was likely to be called in on the expiration date; that an extension is really a new transaction, which the bank is at liberty to refuse to enter. Oh, he gave it to me cold and clammy,sitting back in his big chair and staring up at me through the smoke of a fat black cigar while he did it!"
"And then?" prompted Griswold.
"Then I remembered the mother and sister, Kenneth, and did what I would have died rather than do for myself—I begged like a dog. But I might as well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the bank."
Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to Jasper Grierson.
"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"
"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."
"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and I'll contribute the remaining ninety."
Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly turned into high-voltage electrodes.
"You will?—you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing hard and trying to go on. "By Jove—it's the most generous thing I ever heard of!—but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing inthe world to offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."
"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a Socialist are you, Raymer?"
The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching aside of the subject.
"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I guess."
"Including the men in your shops?"
"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."
"You pay fair wages?"
"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of profit-sharing."
Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.
"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner, Raymer? I'm not making it a condition,mind you: come here any time after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you. But I do hope you won't turn me down."
Raymer was gripping the arms of his chair again, but this time they were not unpleasantly electrified.
"If I had only myself to consider, I shouldn't keep you waiting a second," he returned, heartily. "But it may take a little time to persuade my mother and sister. If they could only know you"—then, forgetting the crossed wire and his late overhearings—"why can't you come out to dinner with me to-night?"
"For the only reason that would make me refuse; I have a previous bidding. But I'll be glad to go some other day. There is no hurry about this business matter; take all the time you need—after you have made Mr. Grierson take his claws out of you."
Raymer had filled the borrowed pipe again and was pulling at it reflectively. "About this partnership; what would be your notion?" he asked.
"The simplest way is always the best. Increase your capital stock and let me in for as much as my ninety thousand dollars will buy," said the easily satisfied investor. "We'll let it go at that until you've had time to think it over, and talk it over with your mother and sister."
The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.
"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one," he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand;could you afford to lose it?—or is it your whole stake in the game?"
Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not offended.
"It is practically my entire stake—and I can very well afford to lose it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you like, but both halves of it are true."
"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business, but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was opened."
Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he asked.
"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the map——"
"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you at ten to-morrow?"
"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away, and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his mistake.
Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs. Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his dinner bidding.
Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.
The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning fromcause to effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than probable that she would be able to do it again?
Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office. It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of theBelle Julie. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that she might remember his voice.
He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the few squares to the Main Street office.
"I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late," said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the neighbors have brought in anything good to eat."
The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do, Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's companion.
"Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten, turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"
Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely unchanged. Having, for his own part, lived through so many experiences since that final glimpse of her standing on the saloon-deck guards of theBelle Julieat St. Louis, the distance in time seemed almost immeasurable.
"You are very welcome to Home Nook, Mr. Griswold;we have been hearing about you for many weeks," she was saying when he had relinquished the firm hand and was hanging his coat and hat on the hall-rack. And then, with a half-embarrassed laugh: "I am afraid we are dreadful gossips; all Wahaska has been talking about you, you know, and wondering how it came to acquire you."
"It hasn't acquired anything very valuable," was the guest's modest disclaimer, its readiness arising out of a grateful easing of strains now that the actual face-to-face ordeal had safely passed its introductory stage. "And you mustn't say a word against your charming little city, Miss Farnham," he went on. "It is the friendliest, most hospitable——"
The doctor's daughter was interrupting with an enthusiastic show of applause.
"Come on out to dinner, both of you," she urged; and then to Griswold: "I want you to say all those nice things to Aunt Fanny, and as many more as you can think of. She has never admitted for a single moment that Wahaska can be compared with any one of a dozen New Hampshire villages she could name."
In the progress to the cozy, home-like dining-room, Griswold found himself at once in an atmosphere of genuine comfort and refinement; the refinement which speaks of generations of good breeding chastened and purified by the limitations of a slender purse; in the present instance the purse of the good little doctor whose attempted charity in the matter of his own fee was fresh in the mind of thecastaway. Griswold had the writing craftsman's ingathering eye: he saw that the furnishings were frugally well-worn, that the sitting-room rug was country-woven, and that the spotless dining-room napery was soft and pliable with age. The contrast between the Farnham home and the ornate mansion three streets away on the lake front was strikingly apparent; as cleanly marked as that between Margery Grierson and the sweetly serene and conventional young person who was introducing him to her aunt across the small oval dining-table.
So far, all was going well. Griswold, with a pleasant word for the frail little woman opposite and a retort in kind now and then for the doctor's raillery, still had time to be narrowly observant of the signs and omens. But a little later, when the Swedish maid was serving the meat course, he had his first warning shock. Through the bouillon and the fish the doctor had borne the brunt of the table-talk, joking the guest on his humiliating descent from Mereside and the luxuries to a country doctor's table, and laughing at Griswold's half-hearted attempts to decry the luxuries. What word or phrase or trick of speech it was that served to stir the sleeping memories, Griswold could not guess; but it became suddenly apparent that the memories were stirring. In the midst of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.
It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there hadbeen no break in the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating from the moment of interruptions.
Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room, little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made him stay.
Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of present familiarity was automatically closingother doors opening upon the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of his own immunity.
"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"
"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always persists; in a few instances I am quite certain it hasn't. I didn't like the Gulf Coast at all, at first; it seemed so foreign and different and unhomelike. As to people, however——"
She paused, and Griswold entered the breach hardily.
"As to people, you are less easily converted from the original prejudice—or prepossession. So am I. I have learned to place the utmost confidence in the first impression. In my own case it is invariably correct, and if for any reason whatever I suffer any later characterization to take its place, I am always the loser."
She was regarding him curiously over the big book which still lay open between them.
"Is that a part of the writing gift?" she asked.
"No, not specially; most people have it in some more or less workable quantity, though for many it expresses itself only in a vague attraction or repulsion."
"I've had that feeling," she answered quickly.
"I know," he affirmed. "There have been times when, with every reasonable fibre in you urging you to believe the evil, a still stronger impulse has made you believe in the good."
"How can you know that?" she asked; and again he saw in the expressive eyes the flying signals of indeterminate perplexity and apprehension.
Resolutely he pressed the hazardous experiment to its logical conclusion. Once for all, he must know if this young woman with the sympathetic voice and the goddess-like pose could, even under suggestion, be led to link up the past with the present.
"It is my trade to know," he said quietly, closing the book of views and laying it aside. "There have been moments in your life when you would have given much to be able to decide a question of duty or expediency entirely irrespective of your impressions. Isn't that so?"
For one flitting instant he thought he had gone too far. In the hardy determination to win all or lose all, he had been holding her eyes steadily, as the sure mirror in which he should be able to read his sentence, of acquittal or of condemnation. This time there was no mistaking the sudden widening of the pupils to betray the equally sudden awakening of womanly terror.
"Don't be afraid," he began, and he had come thus far on the road to open confession when he saw that she was not looking at him; she was looking past him toward one of the windows giving upon the porch. "What is it?" he demanded, turning to look with her.
"It was a man—he was looking in at the window!" she returned in low tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"
Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home hitching-post.
"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.
Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.
"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows," he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for herself.
"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this time——"
Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when, under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the character ofFideliain the book. Moreover, she would be his touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might, if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the deck-hand of theBelle Julie.
Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have been modified if he had known that theman whose face Miss Farnham had seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.
At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the afternoon.
"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller this afternoon," she began.
The doctor did remember it, and said so.
"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a man—a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has, been travelling thousands of miles to find me."
Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"
"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that 'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so,you remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber—that I had known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr. Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our windows this evening."
By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor Bertie.
"We can't have that at all!" he said incisively. "You did your whole duty in that bank matter; and it was a good deal more than most young women would have done. I'm not going to have you persecuted and harassed—not one minute! Where is this fellow stopping?"
The daughter shook her head. "I don't know. He gave me his card, but it has the New Orleans address only."
"Give it to me and I'll look him up to-morrow."
The card changed hands, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then the daughter began again.
"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you know about him, father."
"I don't know much of anything more than—thanksto Miss Grierson—all the town knows. They brought him here sick—she and her father—as I told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we didn't find any."
"He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my reading."
The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your other shock?"
"It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said—I couldn't remember, a minute afterward, just what it was—was spoken exactly in the voice, and with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of theBelle Julie... said by the man whose name wasnotJohn Wesley Gavitt."
"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be, you know!"
"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence, of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away altogether, or come often enough so that—oh, it's all nonsense, all of it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"
"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.
It was after he had taken up the latest copy of theLancetand was beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the threshed-out subject with a belated query.
"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"
"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the columns of the English medical journal.
But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement, that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young Griswold was rich—or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."
What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.
Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks, made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for himself the exact condition of the businessinto which he had put his money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the writing fit was on him and he had no time.
Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid. In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly, human.
When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator.More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.
"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"
"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."
"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."
"Itisgood; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. YourFlemingis as far beyond me as yourFideliaseems to be beyond you."
"Flemingis human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.
"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"
"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.
"I know; that is what you say"—this with an adorable uptilt of the pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But yourFlemingis going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps. WhenFideliasurprises him,Flemingis almost ready to kill her; not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own miserable life."
"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly. "You don't knowFlemingyet. Have you ever metFidelia?"
"Not as you have drawn her—no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to fall in love with her, farther along—to the humiliation and despair of poorJoan, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."
"But how aboutJoan?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"
"Yes; you are distorting her the other way—making her too inhumanly worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you would get bothFideliaandJoanin better drawing."
He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbedamour propreprompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her own choosing.
"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought would sanction.
"Unkind to whom?—to you, or to Miss Farnham?"
"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.
"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"
"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."
"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read her the chapter before this one: whereFideliagoes down to the dining-room at midnight and findsFlemingbreaking into the silver-safe where the money is hidden?"
"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.
"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she persisted.
"Sometimes," he allowed.
"Well, what did she say when you came to that part whereFideliamakesFlemingsit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."
Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when he was fairly within their influence.
"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that theFideliasin real life don't do such things."
"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting yourFideliado it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances, do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is a false note."