ginary girl of yours?"

He glanced up from the paddle-whittling. "Some day, when we get back
into the world again, I'll show you what she looks like. Can you wait
until then?"

"You don't leave me any choice."

"We ran off the track," he went on, after a little interval of silence.
"You were telling me what I talked about last night."

"Oh, yes; I have forgotten most of it, as I said; but along at the last
there were a good many disjointed things about your fight for
recognition. Once, I remember, you were talking to somebody about soap."

Prime's laugh was a guffaw.

"I can laugh at it now," he chuckled; "but it was mighty binding at the
time--that soap incident. I was down in a hole, in the very bottom of
the hole. I had written a book and couldn't get it published; couldn't
get anybody to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I had friends who were
willing to lend me money to go on with, and one who offered me a job
writing advertisements for his soap factory. It was horribly tempting,
but when I was built, the ability to let go, even of a failure, was left
out. So I didn't become an ad. writer. What else did I say?"

"Oh, a lot of things that didn't make sense; one of them was about an
advertisement you said you had seen in the _New York Herald_. I couldn't
make out what it was; something about an English estate."

Prime looked up quickly.

"Isn't it odd how these perfectly inconsequent things bury themselves
somewhere in the human brain, to rise up and sneak out some time when
the bars happen to be left down," he speculated. "There was such an ad.,
and I saw it; but I don't believe I have given it a second thought from
that time to this."

"When you spoke of it last night, you seemed to be telling Mr. Grider
about it. Was it addressed to you?"

"It was addressed to the heirs of Roger Prime, of Batavia, and Roger
Prime was my father. If I remember correctly, the advertisers gave a
Canadian address--Ottawa, I think--and the 'personal' was worded in the
usual fashion: 'If the heirs of Roger Prime will apply'--and so on; you
know how they go. It was the old leg-pull."

"I don't quite understand," she demurred. "What do you mean by
'leg-pull'?"

"The swindle is so venerable that it ought to have whiskers by this
time. Every once in a while a rumor leaks out that some great estate has
been left in England, or somewhere else across the water, with no native
heirs. You or I, if we happen to have a family name that