dig down through the little top layer of
harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself,
tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure.
"If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure
earn what's coming to it."

True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a
pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed
on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at
his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge
cigars, and named her errand.

"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly,
exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.

Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had
given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go
and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had
gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of
a private box in the safety vault--a wonder that had lost itself in a
multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.

* * * * *

For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the
upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little
doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather
anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.

During the week there were many callers at the lake-fronting mansion;
some coming frankly to welcome the returned house-mistress, others to
make the welcoming an excuse for finding out the particulars in the
castaway episode. But neither faith nor good works seemed to have any
effect on the rebellious minority, and at the end of the week Raymer
once more had the pleasure of lifting Miss Grierson from the high trap
at the door of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, and of exchanging a few
words with her before she went in to see her father.

As on any other business day, President Grierson was solidly planted in
his heavy arm-chair before a desk well littered with work. He nodded
absently to his daughter as she entered, and knowing that the nod meant
that he would come to the surface of things--her surface--when he
could, she turned aside to the window and waited.

Though she had seen him develop day by day in less than three of the
thirty-odd years of his Western exile, her father offered a constant
s