g mutual disappearance. Especially the last six
months when I've been planning. But now that's settled.

"Mary will have more than enough and the children are grown. They won't
know--I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly
everything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of
Prominent Financier--Foul Play Suspected' and that'll be all.

"As for the Commercial--I haven't come to my age without finding
out that nobody in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me
tomorrow they'd have to do without me--and Harris and the young men can
handle things.

"But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from
business with a country house and a garden he can putter around in
all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads Dickens to him in the
evening--oh yes, Rose, we'll take Dickens along. And he'll be pretty
contented as things go--that retired old gentleman."

The darkness had passed from his eyes--he was smiling now.

"Be nice--eh Rose?"

He took her hand--the warm touch was still strong, still reassuring.
Only the eyes that he was not looking at now seemed singularly unsure,
as if they had seen something they had pondered over lightly, as a mere
possibility, years ago, take on sudden impatient body and demand to be
heard.

She let her hand lie lightly in his for a moment. Then she rose.

"Half past twelve" she said a little stiffly. "Time for two such genuine
antiques as we are to think of being put away in our cases for the
night."

XXII

It was three in the afternoon before Oliver walked into the Hotel
Rosario again and when he did it was with the feeling that the house
detective might come up at any moment, touch him quietly on the shoulder
and remark that his bag _might_ be sent down to the station after him
if he paid his bill and left quietly and at once. An appearance before a
hoarse judge who fined him ten dollars in as many seconds had not helped
his self-confidence though he kept wondering if there was a sliding
scale of penalties for improper language applied to the police of St.
Louis and just what would have happened if he had called the large blue
policeman anything out of his A.E.F. vocabulary. Also the desk, when he
called there for his key, reminded him twingingly of the dock, and the
clerk behind it looked at him so knowingly as he made the request that
Oliver began to construct a hasty moral defence of his whole life from
the tim