riot act to Tom Judson. He’ll ship now; I’ve just been out to see him.” Then to David: “Young man, how soon can I get a train back to Chicago?”

David looked up the required information. The next through train would leave at four minutes past nine o’clock. The visitor glanced at a watch[32] big enough and thick enough to have been used as a missile.

[32]

“That gives us about four hours, Adam,” he rumbled, “and we ought to be able to pull up a good lot of the arrears in that length of time. Shut up your desk and call it a day. We’ll trot over to the hotel and be boys together for a little while. David will stay here and wind up the odds and ends of the day’s business for you.”

Adam Vallory was opening his mouth to protest hospitably against the hotel, but his son broke in ahead of him.

“That’s right, Mr. Grillage; I’m mighty glad you can have a little time with Dad,” he interposed quickly. “We were speaking of you this morning, and I was telling Dad that I had met you for a few minutes one day last winder in Florida. Take him away with you, and I’ll stay and close the bank.”

“Good boy!” was the gruff rejoinder. “By and by, when you get around to it, you may make a sleeper reservation for me on that nine o’clock train. Wire for it, and bring the answer over to the hotel. No, Adam”—to the host who was trying to make himself the entertainer instead of the entertained—“no, you’re not going to take me home with you, this time. I want you all to myself.[33] We’ll go to the St. Nicholas and make old Vignaux give us one of his Frenchy dinners in a private room. Get your hat and come along.”

[33]

Left to himself, David Vallory checked over the day’s transactions with Winkle, telegraphed for the big man’s berth in the Chicago sleeping-car, and then walked out to the tree-shaded suburb on the hill to eat his dinner with the sister whom he had not yet seen. To his great satisfaction he found young Herbert Oswald at the house, and the presence of the young lawyer, who was easily persuaded to make a third at the family dinner-table, pushed the disaster explanations, or such of them as might have to be made to the blind girl, a little farther into the future.

Though David forced himself to talk at the table-for-three, his cheerful attempts to keep the conversation in some safe middle-of-the-road channel did not obscure for him the 

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