now need a second overseer again--a man
of brains, good temper, and physical endurance, who can keep accounts.
Experience isn't at all necessary. There's my Englishman there, my
Christmas tramp, you recall; he'll show De Presle-Vaulx his duties.
It's a good enough berth for any determined chap who has his way to
make and an ideal to work for. I purpose to send this Frenchman out on
a salary and to see what stuff he's made of. After a year or two, with
good sense and push, he will be in a position to ask any girl to be his
wife. I'll raise his salary, and if Molly is the girl I take her for,
she will help him there."

"And his family, Jimmy?"

"Damn his family!" risked the aroused Bulstrode.

Mrs. Falconer laughed.

"Really! It is casual of you! but you don't know them and can't! But
they can quite spoil the whole thing as far as Molly is concerned. His
tradition and race, his home and all it means to him--why you can't
roughly run against all the old conventions like that, my dear man!"

"Well," said the ruthless gentleman, "then he can go and feed on their
charity, can take to his flesh-pots and give up the girl. She is far
too good for any foreign fortune-hunter anyway. You spoil a man, all
of you. You'd prefer a disreputable roue to a cowboy with money in his
pocket and a heart."

"Would it then prove to you De Presle-Vaulx's heart if he threw over
his family and went West?"

"Yes," said the other quickly. "It would prove he loves the girl."

"You forget his mother."

Bulstrode fumed.

"I have not the honor to forget her; I don't know the Marquise de
Presle-Vaulx."

"I do," interrupted his friend. "She is a charming, gentle old dear;
narrow, if you call it so, clear-headed and delightful. She adores her
only son, and thinks quite properly that his name, his estates,
beautiful if mortgaged, are a fair exchange for an American _dot_.
Maurice de Presle-Vaulx, after all, does not go poverty-stricken to the
woman he marries. There are not so many ways to live after one is
twenty-five, and to uproot this scion of an old race, to exact such a
sacrifice----"

"It would make a man of him."

"He is one already. There are all kinds, I need not tell you so."

"He is head over heels in debt."

Mrs. Falconer laughed again.

"We make him out an acrobat between us."

"He gambles on borrowed money."

"You mean that you have forced him to borrow from you? He will pay
what he owes, I am sure of