just as I turned from Main Street," replied
Randolph, soberly, but he was inwardly amused. He understood his
mother. But there was something which he did not tell her concerning
his experience with the new-comers, the Carrolls. Shortly, she went
out to give some directions about tea, and Randolph, sitting beside a
window in the parlor with an evening paper, drew from his pocket a
letter just received in the mail, and examined it again. It was from
a city bank, and it contained a repudiated check for ten dollars,
made out by Captain Arthur Carroll, and which Anderson had cashed a
few days previous at the request of the pretty young girl in the
carriage, who to-night had sat there looking at him and did not
speak, either because she had forgotten his face as he did her the
little favor, or because he was so far away from her social scale
that she was innocently unaware of any necessity for it.
Chapter V
Randolph Anderson had a large contempt for money used otherwise than
for its material ends. A dollar never meant anything to him except
its equivalent in the filling of a need. Generosity and the impulse
of giving were in his blood, yet it had gone hard several times with
people who had tried to overreach him even to a trifling extent. But
now he submitted without a word to losing ten dollars through cashing
Arthur Carroll's worthless check. He himself was rather bewildered at
his tame submission. One thing was certain, although it seemed
paradoxical; if he had not had suspicions as to Arthur Carroll's
perfect trustworthiness, he would at once have gone to him with the
check.
"I dare say he overdrew his account without knowing it, as many an
honest man does," he reasoned, when trying to apologize to himself
for his unbusiness-like conduct, but always he knew subconsciously
that if he had been perfectly sure of that view of it he would not
have hesitated to put it to the proof. For some reason, probably
unconfessed rather than actually hidden from himself, he shrank from
a possible discovery to Arthur Carroll's discredit. When a man of
Randolph Anderson's kind replies to a question concerning the beauty
of a young girl that he does not know, the assumption is warranted
that he has given the matter consideration. A man usually leaps to a
decision of that kind, and if he has no ulterior motive for
concealment, he would as lief proclaim it to the house-tops.
Usually Randolph Anderson would no more have hesitated
|