left the private office
of Mr. Van Riper he had two things to do. One was to tell his wife, the
other was to assign enough property to Van Riper to cover the amount of
the defalcation. Both had been done before night.

[Illustration]

V.

It is to be said for society that there was very little chuckling and
smiling when this fresh piece of news about the Dolphs came out. Nor did
the news pass from house to house like wildfire. It rather leaked out
here and there, percolating through barriers of friendly silence,
slipping from discreet lips and repeated in anxious confidence, with all
manner of qualifications and hopeful suppositions and suggestions. As a
matter of fact, people never really knew just what Eustace Dolph had
done, or how far his wrong-doing had carried him. All that was ever
positively known was that the boy had got into trouble down-town, and
had gone to Europe. The exact nature of the trouble could only be
conjectured. The very brokers who had been the instruments of young
Dolph's ruin were not able to separate his authorized speculations from
those which were illegitimate. They could do no more than guess, from
what they knew of Van Riper's conservative method of investment, that
the young man's unfortunate purchases were made for himself, and they
figured these at fifty-five thousand odd hundred dollars.

Somebody, who looked up the deed which Jacob Dolph executed that winter
day, found that he had transferred to Van Riper real estate of more than
that value.

No word ever came from the cold lips of Abram Van Riper's son; and his
office was a piece of all but perfect machinery, which dared not creak
when he commanded silence. And no one save Van Riper and Dolph, and
their two lawyers, knew the whole truth. Dolph never even spoke about it
to his wife, after that first night. It was these five people only who
knew that Mr. Jacob Dolph had parted with the last bit of real estate
that he owned, outside of his own home, and they knew that his other
property was of a doubtful sort, that could yield at the best only a
very limited income--hardly enough for a man who lived in so great a
house, and whose doors were open to all his friends nine months in the
year.

Yet he stayed there, and grew old with an age which the years have not
among their gifts. When his little girl was large enough to sit upon his
knee, her small hands clutched at a snowy-white mustache, and she
complained that his grea