.

On a bench in Grant Park Congdon swung himself into a confidential
attitude.

"Life's the devil's own business," he said with a deep sigh. "I've got
to a place where I don't care what happens--everything black anywhere I
look. I've been trying for the past four or five years to do things God
Almighty never intended me to do. I was happily married; two beautiful
children; none finer,--but I'll shorten up the story so you can see what
a monkey fate has made of me. My father's a crank, a genius in his way,
but decidedly eccentric. My mother died when I was a youngster and as I
was an only child father tried all sorts of schemes of educating me,
whimsical notions, one after another. The result was I've never got a
look in anywhere; unfitted for everything. After I married he still
tried to hold the rein on me, wanted to put me into businesses I hated
and kept meddling with my domestic affairs. All this made me weak and
irresolute. I have a mechanical turn--not a strong bent but the only
thing that ever tugged at me very hard. Almost made some important
inventions, but only almost. About the time I'd get a good start father
would shoot me off into something else, and if I refused he'd cut off my
allowance. Never set me up for myself; keeps me dependent on his bounty.
Humiliating; positively humiliating!"

"I can imagine so," Archie agreed. He had now got the explanation of the
blue prints in the Bailey Harbor house and found himself deeply
interested in Congdon's recital.

"Well, sir, I was about to offer myself as exhibit _A_ on a slab in the
nearest morgue," Congdon continued, "when I met a young woman who
_seemed_ to understand me, and right there's where I made the greatest
mistake of my life. It was last spring when that happened. Talk about
plausibility, Comly! The word never had any meaning until that girl came
along. She made a fool of me; that's the short of it. I took her into
dinner at the house of some friends right here in Chicago--I lived here
about a month trying to learn a patent medicine business father had gone
into. The thing was a fake; a ghastly imposition on the public. Such
things have a weird fascination for father; it's simply an obsession,
for he doesn't need the money."

He was wandering into a description of various other dubious businesses
that had attracted Eliphalet Congdon when Archie, nervously twisting a
folded newspaper, brought him back to the girl who had played so
mischievous a