ous welcome. Looking up
with a half-unconscious smile, Bradley met Lady Canterbridge's examining
eyes.

The next morning, finding an opportunity to be alone with him, Bradley,
with a tactful mingling of sympathy and directness informed his host
that he was cognizant of the disaster that had overtaken the Bank, and
delicately begged him to accept any service he could render him. "Pardon
me," he said, "if I speak as plainly to you as I would to your son: my
friendship for him justifies an equal frankness to any one he loves; but
I should not intrude upon your confidence if I did not believe that my
knowledge and assistance might be of benefit to you. Although I did not
sell my lands to Richardson or approve of his methods," he continued, "I
fear it was some suggestion of mine that eventually induced him to form
the larger and more disastrous scheme that ruined the Bank. So you see,"
he added lightly, "I claim a right to offer you my services." Touched
by Bradley's sincerity and discreet intelligence, Sir Robert was equally
frank. During the recital of his Californian investments--a chronicle
of almost fatuous speculation and imbecile enterprise--Bradley was
profoundly moved at the naive ignorance of business and hopeless
ingenuousness of this old habitue of a cynical world and an intriguing
and insincere society, to whom no scheme had been too wild for
acceptance. As Bradley listened with a half-saddened smile to the grave
visions of this aged enthusiast, he remembered the son's unsophisticated
simplicity: what he had considered as the "boyishness" of immaturity was
the taint of the utterly unpractical Mainwaring blood. It was upon this
blood, and others like it, that Oldenhurst had for centuries waxed and
fattened.

Bradley was true to his promise of assistance, and with the aid of two
or three of his brother-millionaires, whose knowledge of the resources
of the locality was no less powerful and convincing than the security
of their actual wealth, managed to stay the immediate action of the
catastrophe until the affairs of the Sierran Land and Timber Company
could be examined and some plan of reconstruction arranged.

During this interval of five months, in which the credit of Sir Robert
Mainwaring was preserved with the secret of his disaster, Bradley was a
frequent and welcome visitor to Oldenhurst. Apart from his strange and
chivalrous friendship for the Mainwarings--which was as incomprehensible
to Sir Robert as S