way I
couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away
altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of
it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"

"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large
confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where
their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.

It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was
beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the
threshed-out subject with a belated query.

"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"

"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold
upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the
columns of the English medical journal.

But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he
remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement,
that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young
Griswold was rich--or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."

XXVI

PITFALLS

What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that
Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson
figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to
guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer,
angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty
generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the
fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine
Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous
characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its
possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the
newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.

Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned
heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished
only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a
few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks,
made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for
himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his
money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial
activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the
writing fit was on him a