One afternoon, when he had
taken the party up the river, he announced bluntly after tea that he and
Adelle were going out in a punt together. Leaving Miss Comstock and the
three other girls to amuse themselves as they could, he stoutly pulled
forth from the landing and around a bend in the river. Thereafter his
efforts relaxed, and he had Adelle to himself for two long hours. And
Adelle, reclining on the gaudy cushions under an enormous pink sunshade,
was not unenticing. Her air of indolent taciturnity was almost
provoking. Mr. Ashly Crane quite persuaded himself that he was really in
love with the young heiress.

Oddly enough he chose this opportunity to discuss with her her business
affairs, which was the excuse he had tossed Miss Comstock for
abstracting the ward from the rest of the party. He found that she knew
almost nothing about the source of her fortune--that lean stretch of
sandy acres known as Clark's Field. He related to her the outline of the
story of the Field as it has been told in these pages. Adelle listened
with a peculiarly blank expression on her pale face. She was in fact
trying hard to recall certain distant images of her early life--memories
that were neither pleasant nor painful, but very odd to her, so strange
that she could not realize herself as having once been the little drudge
in the rooming-house on Church Street, with the manager of the
livery-stable as the star roomer. While the banker was relating the
steps by which she had become an heiress, she was seeing the face of the
liveryman and that of the probate judge, who had first taken an active
part in her destiny and turned it into its present smooth course....

"So," Mr. Crane was saying, "the bank was finally able to make an
arrangement by which the long deadlock was broken and Clark's Field
could be sold--put on the market in small lots, you know. Owing to a
very fortunate provision, you are the beneficiary of one half of the
sales made by the Field Associates, as the corporation is
called--whenever they dispose of any of it they pay us for you half the
money!"

(He neglected to state that this "fortunate provision" was due solely to
the shrewdness and probity of Judge Orcutt; that if he and the trust
company's president had had their way she would have been obliged to
content herself with a much more modest income than she now enjoyed. But
doubtless Mr. Crane felt that was irrelevant.)

"So you see, little girl," he concluded, in