good chances. The other way was as absurd as the four-year-old
prodigy who typewrites and is rather fond of Greek. But I loved your
daughter and I thought it quite the right thing to do. I asked your
daughter just now if she was willing to live with a poor man,
according to her standards, as your wife lived with you--to give me
her help and her faith in me.

"Do you know what she answered? She told me to come to you and truckle
for another big loan, which I am not capable of handling, to cheat
legally and never hint to the world the truth of the affair. She
hadn't the most remote idea that I was in earnest when I told her I
was going to be a failure in the eyes of the world--but I was not
going to have my wife's father support me. I'm not sorry this has
happened--feel as if the Old Man of the Sea had dropped off me. But
this is the thing: either my wife and I will live in a home of our
own, and such a home as I can provide, being an independent and proper
family and keeping our problems and responsibilities within our gates;
or else your daughter is going to stay with you and lose her one
chance of freedom while I leave town."

The Basque grandmother and the Celtic grandfather lent Steve all their
passionate determination and keenness of insight, as they once lent
him chivalry, humour, and charm. He stood before the old man taut with
excitement and flushed with sudden fury.

"It is you I blame," he added before Constantine could make answer.
"You kept her as useless as a china shepherdess; it is not her fault
if she fails to rise to the occasion now."

Constantine's face quivered; what the emotion was none but himself
knew.

"You poor fool boy!" he said, thickly. "Don't you know I made you a
rich man all along the line? You never did anything at all. It wasn't
luck on the stock exchange--it was Mark Constantine back of you. Gad,
to have made what you did in the time you did you'd have had to do
worse than dabble your hands in the mud. You'd have had to roll in
it--like I did." He gave a coarse laugh. "That was what I figured out
when you said you wanted Beatrice and what you were going to do to try
to get her. I liked you, I wanted you for her husband. I hated the
other puppies. So I wasn't going to have Beatrice's husband a
cutthroat and a highbinder as he would have to be if he had turned the
whole trick.

"You young fool, don't you suppose I made the stock exchange yield
you the sugarplums? Gad, I knew every