ha'n't. You know very
well that Bromley is in love with you--up to his chin, and I'm afraid
you have been too kind to him. That is a little hard on Loudon, you
know--when you are going to marry some one else. But let that rest, and
tell me a little more about this stock deal. Why should there be a
'gentlemen's agreement' to exclude your father? To a rank outsider like
myself, Arcadia Irrigation would seem to be about the last thing in the
world Colonel Adam Craigmiles would want to buy."

"Under present conditions, I think it is," she said. "_I_ shouldn't buy
it now."

"What would you do, O wise virgin of the market-place?"

"I'd wait patiently while the rocket is going up; I might even clap my
hands and say 'Ah-h-h!' with the admiring multitude. But afterward, when
the stick comes down, I'd buy every bit of Arcadia Irrigation I could
find."

Again he was regarding her through half-closed eyelids.

"As I said before, you know too much about such things--altogether too
much." He said it half in raillery, but his deduction was made seriously
enough. "You think your father will win his law-suit and so break the
market?"

"No; on the contrary, I'm quite sure he will be beaten. I am going, now.
Don't ask me any more questions: I've said too much to the company's
engineer, as it is."

"You have said nothing to the company's engineer," he denied. "You have
been talking to Breckenridge Ballard, your future----"

She set the car in motion before he could complete the sentence, and he
stood looking after it as it shot away up the hills. It was quite out of
sight, and the sound of its drumming motor was lost in the hoarse
grumbling of the river, before he began to realise that Elsa's visit had
not been for the purpose of asking him to send for Gardiner, nor yet to
beg him not to be vindictive. Her real object had been to warn him not
to buy Arcadia Irrigation. "Why?" came the unfailing question,
shot-like; and, like all the others of its tribe, it had to go
unanswered.

It was two days later when Gardiner, the assistant professor of geology,
kept his appointment, was duly met at Alta Vista by Ballard's special
engine and a "dinkey" way-car, and was transported in state to the
Arcadian fastnesses. Ballard had it in mind to run down the line on the
other engine to meet the Bostonian; but Elsa forestalled him by
intercepting the "special" at Ackerman's with the motor-car and whisking
the guest over the roundabout road to