confide to her father what
she knew of the man. "He's no gentleman," she thought. "But that would
not be any reason for his being a bad business man," she reflected
shrewdly. And in spite of her woman's misgivings of any person who was
errant "that way," she decided to be silent. "He may have regretted
it,--poor old thing."

Snowden left the place with them. Drawn up in front of the building was
a small delivery wagon, with a spindly horse and a boy. Freshly painted
on the dull black cover was the legend: "H. Ridge & Co. TEAS AND
COFFEES."

"City deliveries," Horatio explained. Snowden smiled wanly. Somehow the
spindly horse did not inspire Milly with confidence, nor the small boy.
But the outfit might answer very well for "city deliveries." Milly was
determined to see nothing but a rosy future for the venture. She
listened smilingly to Horatio, who bobbed along by her side, talking all
the time.

Evidently things had been moving with the Ridges since her departure.
Milly's insistent ambitions had borne fruit. She had roused the
quiescent Horatio. Hoppers' mail-order house offered a secure berth for
a middle-aged man, who had rattled half over the American continent in
search of stability. But, he told himself, the fire was not all out of
his veins yet, and Milly supplied the incentive this time "to better
himself." After some persuasion he had hired his friend Snowden, who had
not yet been invited to become a partner at Hoppers', and who agreed to
put ten thousand dollars into the new business, which Horatio was to
manage. And Grandma Ridge had been persuaded to invest five thousand
dollars, half of what the judge had left her, in her son's new venture.
Then a chance of buying out the China American Tea Company had come.
Horatio, of course, knew nothing about tea, and less about coffee; his
experience had been wholly in drugs. But he argued optimistically that
tea and coffee in a way were drugs, and if a man could sell one sort of
drugs why not another? He saw himself in his own office, signing the
firm's name,--his own name!

"Father!" Milly exclaimed that evening, throwing her arms boisterously
about the little man, in the hoydenish manner so much deplored by her
grandmother,--"Isn't it great! Your own business--and you'll make lots
of money, lots--I'm perfectly sure."

Her ambitions began to flower. There was a delicious sense of venture to
the whole thing: it offered that expansible horizon so necessary to t