"Let us say a question of business," he suggested. "Six months ago I entered your employ as a chauffeur. You will find my record has no marks against it. I did not think at that time of drawing any advantage from the fact that the mill belonged to you; I worked exactly as I must have done for any stranger. I was not late or absent, I accomplished rather more each day than the average chauffeur in the place. Cook and Ransome can tell you whether I gave them satisfaction. I only speak of this, sir, because I should like you to understand that I was in earnest. It was not until months had pa.s.sed at this work that I began to think of changing my position. One day Ransome fell sick. I asked for his place to try out a better system of checking the shipping that had occurred to me. I was given this at first tentatively, then permanently. In fact, the system worked so successfully that--Mr. Goodwin came to see me." He hesitated. "I wish you would ask Mr. Goodwin to tell you himself something of what has happened."

"Very well."

The laconic a.s.sent was somehow disconcerting.

"I had to tell him who I was," Anthony resumed, with less certainty, "I had meant to find out what your att.i.tude would be, before that happened, but I had no choice. He was good enough to take me into his office and offer to teach me the management of your factory. Now----"

"Now, since it is a matter of business," said Mr. Adriance, dryly, "what do you want?"

"I want a stranger's chance, and your pull," was the prompt return; Anthony's smile flashed across seriousness. "That is, I want your influence to give me Mr. Goodwin's position as manager, and after that I am willing to stand on the basis of my business value to you. Goodwin is old and anxious to retire. If I hold his place for a year and fail to earn his salary, then discharge me and I'll not complain. I know this end of your business as you do not, sir. You are brilliant, a genius of big affairs; I have discovered in myself a capacity for meticulous attention to detail. Will you take this little book home with you? It contains a collection of notes and figures for which you would gladly pay an outsider. Mr. Goodwin and I have found the plant is enormously wasteful; every department contributes its quota of mismanagement, except the office under his own eye. I want a chance to do this work, to buy a house I like up on the hill, here, and put my delicate Southern wife in a setting suitable for her. Will you let me earn all this?"

"I am not aware that it has been my custom to interfere with you,"

retorted Mr. Adriance. He eyed his son with icy disfavor. "Between you and Mr. Masterson it appears to be established that I am the typical oppressor of fiction and melodrama. Kindly look at the other side of the shield. Last autumn you chose to marry and leave my house. You did both, without paying me the trifling courtesy of announcing your intentions. I knew of no quarrel between us. The rudeness appeared to me quite without warrant. Nevertheless, I tied all the loose ends you had left behind.

I kept your marriage from furnishing a sensation to the journals. The lady who is now my wife helped me in convincing our friends that your wedding was in no way unusual or unexpected, if a little sudden, and that you had met the young lady from Louisiana at her house. In short, I smothered curiosity, a task with which you had not concerned yourself.

You choose to enter this place as a truck driver. You did not ask if that were pleasant to me. It was not, but I made no objection. Oh, yes; of course I have known what you were doing! Why should I not know? Now, you meet me with the air of a man hampered and pursued. Why?"

"I was wrong," admitted Anthony, simply. He had flushed hotly before the rebuke, but his eyes met his father's frankly and with a relief that gladly found himself at fault rather than the other. "I did not understand. I am sorry."

They shook hands. A constraint between them was not to be avoided. The marriage of the older man had thrust them apart. Unforgiveable things had been said of Lucille Adriance; things that had the biting permanence of truth.

"I will arrange for Goodwin's retirement," Mr. Adriance remarked. "You will take his place, and this winter's work may pa.s.s as your whim to study the business from the bottom. I spent an hour discussing your affairs with him, on my way here, to-night. I had called on him to ascertain your exact address. He has agreed to remain as your adviser and a.s.sistant for a month or two, until you have quite found yourself.

And of course I will be at your service. That is enough for this evening; I have already stayed here too long. Come to my office to-morrow."

When he turned toward the door, Elsie was awaiting him. A moment before she had slipped away from the two men.

"This is the first time you have been in Anthony's house," she said, her soft speech very winning. "You aren't going without taking our hospitality?"

She held a little round tray on which stood a cup and plate. The action was gracious and graceful, quaintly alien as her own legends. Mr.

Adriance gazed at her, then bowed ceremoniously, lifted the coffee and drank.

"I think I had forgotten to congratulate Tony," he regretted. "Allow me to do so, most warmly."

Anthony closed the door behind his guest; presently the sound of a starting motor ruffled the calm hush of the spring evening.

"I want my supper," Anthony announced, practically. "I shall not have any more of your cooking, Elsie. What are you going to do with your idle time--learn to play bridge?"

She ran into his arms.

CHAPTER XX

THE CORNERSTONE

When they looked for Fred Masterson, he was not there. Elsie remembered, then, that he had gone into Holly's room while Anthony and his father were intent on each other. On the bed where the baby was asleep they found an envelope upon which was scrawled a message.

"I'm off for the present," Anthony read. "I'll drop in to-morrow or next day, when Holly is awake. Thank Mrs. Adriance for me. I'm going to be old-fashioned, Tony--G.o.d bless you both."

"He never will come, I know it!" Elsie exclaimed, her heavy lashes wet.

"Can't we do something? Can't we go after him?"

"I will go after him," her husband agreed. "But not to-night." He crumpled the envelope and flung it aside. "Fred Masterson is not going under without a fight. If doctors, sanitariums, his love for Holly and our help can set him on his feet again, he shall be cured and do all he dreams of doing. To-morrow I will find him."

"Not to-night?"

"Not to-night. Elsie, don't you understand? He loved his wife. If I lost you so--if you married someone else----"

She put her small fingers across his lips, stilling the sacrilege.

"No! Do not let our little house even hear you say it!"

"Nor any house of ours! To-morrow I will buy the house we looked at together, and you shall have an orgy of shopping to furnish it. Oh, yes, you shall, and I'll help you. Have lots of dark red things and brown leather in that front room where you told me about Alenya of the Sea.

And--do nurseries have to be pink?"

"Of course not, foolish one. We might make ours sunshine-color, like the satiny inside of a b.u.t.tercup or a drop of honey in a daffodil.

Anthony----"

"Yes?"

The rain-gray eyes laughed up at him, demure and daring.

"Please, I want a cloak all gorgeous without and furry within; a shimmery, glittery, useless brocaded cloak like those in the cloak-room of that restaurant. I--I just want it!"

"How do you know?" he wondered at her. "How do you always know the gracious way to delight me most? What a time we are going to have, girl!

I'm going to drag Cook out of his rut and start him up the ladder, for one thing. If he hadn't given me a chance, and then brought Mr. Goodwin down to see how I handled it, who can tell how much I might have missed?

I shall bring him here for you to see, before we move, too. You won't mind?"

"Try it and see."

"And we will spend my first vacation in Louisiana! Can't we take a trunkful of junk to each girl--including your mother? Let's bribe a publisher to bring out the poetic drama, if it's ever finished. Ah, be ready to come to Tiffany's next week. I'm going to buy you a ruby as big as the diamond advertis.e.m.e.nts on the backs of the magazines."

"Anthony!"

"Two of them!"

"Dear," she hesitated, "are we going to have so much money? I do not quite see----"

Her husband looked at her, and laughed.

"You haven't learned to understand your father-in-law. I have not mastered that study, myself, but I know some branches. He is not a half-way man. He will expect Tony and Mrs. Tony to proceed precisely as Tony used to do. And we will offend and disgust him with our small-mindedness if we do not take this for granted. When I remember the things I allowed Fred to make me believe of him! Elsie, I always could have earned our living somehow; I think the best news to-night was that my father is as fine as I grew up to believe him. By George, I never told him----"

"What, dear?"

"Don't you know?"