s hammering itself into his brain. _You
have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all
she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to
you_. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most
unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise
him?

The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a
door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.

"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he
announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at
once.

"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the
house and had turned their faces townward.

"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank
to sell her stock--won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now,
when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted,
mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I
tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the
jaw--intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people
needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"

Kent's laugh was mirthless.

"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for
the accusation.

If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to
steer clear of that shoal.

"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with
Elinor."

"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother
would have the casting vote."

"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."

"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now--as
between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean--but there will
probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.
We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."

The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said:
"Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't
altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes
to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car.
Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss
what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."

David Kent stopped short