"Now, aren't you glad you listened to a wise little person who is going to make your fortune?" she said, thrilled at the sight of the check.

"Who gave you the tip, Doris?" he said uneasily. "You can tell me now."

"Ask me no questions--"

"A man or a woman?" he persisted, seeking a subterfuge, for the thought of asking pointblank if he owed his fortune to Boskirk was repugnant.

She hesitated a moment, divining his qualms.

"Promise to ask no more questions."

"If you'll tell me."

"A woman, then."

He pretended to himself a great satisfaction, immensely relieved in his pride, willing to be convinced. Dan Drake came in and Doris, glad of the interruption, displayed the check in triumph.

"So that's it, is it?" said Drake, glancing up at Bojo, who looked sheepishly happy. And a.s.suming an angry air, he caught Doris by the ear.

"A traitor in my own household, eh?"

"What do you mean?" she said, defending herself.

"I mean the next time you wheedle such inside information out, just remember you've got a daddy."

"Now, Dad, don't be horrid and take away all my fun. Isn't it glorious!"

"Very," said Drake with a grimace. "I congratulate you, young scamps.

Your getting in and spreading the good news among the bosom friends--"

he glanced at Bojo, who flushed--"cost me a couple of hundred thousand more than I intended to pay. I guess, young man, it'll be cheaper for me to have you inside my office than out!"

"I didn't realize, sir--"

"No reason you should, but I want to tell you and your General Manager so that you won't get any mistaken ideas of your Napoleonic talents, that there was a moment ten days ago when the whole combination came near a cropper, wherever you got your information." He stopped, looked at his daughter severely, and said: "By the way, where _did_ you get your information, young lady?"

Doris laughed mischievously, not at all deceived by his a.s.sumed anger.

"I have my own sources of information," she said, imitating his manner.

The father looked at her shrewdly, amused at the intrigue he divined.

"Well, this is my guess--"

But Doris, flinging herself, laughing, at him, closed his lips with her pretty hand.

"She used Boskirk to help me," thought Bojo, perceiving her start of fear and the shrewd smile on the face of the father.

He did not pursue the matter, but the conviction remained with him.

Despite his new-found resolutions he was surprised to find that the obsession of the ticker still held him. With the announcement of the completion of the Smelter merger, Indiana Smelter rose as high as 142-3/4, and the thought of these thousands which he might have had as easily as not began to annoy him. He forgot that he had condemned speculation in the contemplation of what might have been.

Looking back, it seemed to him that what he had made was ridiculously small. If he had played the stock as other resolute spirits conducting such campaigns for fortune, he should have thrown the rest of his capital behind the venture once he was playing on velvet. He figured out a dozen ways by which he might have achieved a master stroke and trebled, even quadrupled, his profits, and the more his mind dwelt upon it the more eager he became to embark into a fresh venture. Dan Drake had hinted at taking him into his office. He began to long for the time when the proposition would be again offered to him, to accept, to be privileged to play the game as others played it--with marked cards.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RETURN OF PATSIE

During this time Bojo had seen much of life. Marsh was too busily occupied in the detailed exploration of the machinery and organization of his paper to be often available, and Bojo's time was pretty evenly divided between the formal evenings in Doris's set and the excursions with Fred DeLancy into regions not quite so orthodox. He began to see a good deal behind the scenes, to marvel at the unbending of big men of a certain suddenly enriched type, at their gullibility and curious vanities of display. He himself had an innate love of refinement and an olden touch of chivalry in his att.i.tude toward women, and went through what he saw without more harm than disillusionment, wiser for the lesson.

To his surprise he found, that what DeLancy had estimated of his social values was quite true. Fred was in great demand at quiet dances in discreet salons at Tenafly's and Lazare's, where curious elements combined to distract the adventurer, rich at forty-five, who, after a life of Spartan routine, awoke to the call of pleasure and curiosity at an age when other men have solved their att.i.tude. Fred was looked upon as a sort of _enfant gate_ to be rewarded after a gay night with an easily tossed off order for a thousand shares of this or that to make his commission. It did not take Bojo long to perceive the inherent weakness in DeLancy's lovable but pleasure-running character, nor to speculate upon his future with some apprehension, despite all Fred's protestations that he was shrewd as they are made, and jolly well alive to the main chance every minute of the day.

Bojo had been admitted far enough into his confidence to know that there was already some one in the practical background, a Miss Gladys Stone, financially a prize who had been caught with the volatile gaiety and amusing tricks of Fred DeLancy. DeLancy in fact, in moments of serious intimacy, openly avowed his intention of settling down within a year or two at the most, and Bojo, with the memory of riotous nights from which he had with difficulty extracted the popular Fred, owned to himself that the sooner this occurred the better he would be suited.

He had met Gladys Stone once when he had dropped in on Doris, and he had a blurred recollection of a thin, blond girl, who giggled and chattered a great deal and spoke several times of being bored by this or that, by the opera where there was nothing new, by dinner parties where it was such a bore to talk bridge, by Palm Beach, which was getting to be a bore because cheaper hotels had gone up and every one was being let in, but who would go off into peals of laughter the moment Fred DeLancy struck a chord on the piano and imitated a German ballade.

"Gladys is a good soul at bottom. She's crazy about Fred and he can marry her any day he wants her," said Doris, sitting in judgment.

"Do you think it would turn out well?" he said.

"Why not? Gladys hasn't a thought in her head. She'll be a splendid audience for Fred. He isn't the sort of a person ever to fall desperately in love."

"I don't know about that," said Bojo, with an uneasy recollection of a certain alluring but rather obvious little actress, respectable but entirely too calculating to his way of thinking, whom Fred had been seeing entirely too much.

"Nonsense! That sort of person is always thinking of the crowd. Besides Gladys is too stupid to be jealous. It's a splendid match. She'll get a husband that'll save her house from being a bore, and he'll get a pile of money: just what each needs."

He saw Doris three or four times a week. She had become a very busy lady, constantly complaining of the fatigues of a social season. Fred DeLancy, who, with Marsh, had been admitted to intimacy, made fun of her to her face in his impudent way, pretending a deep solicitude for the overburdened rich.

"But it's true," said Doris indignantly. "I haven't a minute to myself.

I'm going from morning to night. You haven't an idea how exacting our lives are."

"Tell me," said DeLancy, a.s.suming a countenance of commiseration, while Bojo laughed.

"Horrid beast!" said Doris, pouting. "And then there's charity; you've no idea how much time charity takes. I'm on three committees and we have to meet once a week for luncheon. Then I'm in the show for the benefit of some hospital or other, and now they want us to come to morning rehearsals. Then there's the afternoon bridge cla.s.s until four, and half a dozen teas to go through, and back to be dressed and curled and start out for dinner and a dance, night after night. And now there's Dolly's wedding coming on, and the dressmaker and the shopping. I tell you I'm beginning to look old already!"

She glanced at the clock and went off with a sigh to be decked out for another social struggle, as Mrs. Drake entered. The young men excused themselves. Bojo never felt quite comfortable under the scrutiny of the mother's menacing lorgnette. She was a frail, uneasy little woman, who dressed too young for her age, whose ready tears had won down the opposition of her husband, much as the steady drip of a tiny rivulet bores its way through granite surfaces. She did not approve of Bojo--a fact of which he was well aware--and was resolved when her first ambition had been gratified by Dolly's coming marriage to turn her forces on Doris.

At present she was too much occupied, for there were weak moments when Dolly, for all her foreign education, rose up in revolt, and others when Mr. Drake, incensed at the cold-blooded conduct of the pre-nuptial business arrangements, had threatened to send the whole pack of impudent lawyers flying. Patsie had been packed off on a visit to a cousin after a series of indiscretions, culminating in a demand to know from the Duke what the French meant by a _mariage de convenance_--a request which fell like a bombsh.e.l.l in a sudden silence of the family dinner.

It was a week before the wedding, as Bojo was swinging up the Avenue past the Park on his way to Doris, that he suddenly became aware of a young lady in white fur cap and black velvets skipping toward him, pursued by a terrier that had a familiar air, while from the attendant automobile a tall and scrawny spinster was gesticulating violently and unheeded. The next moment Patsie had run up to him, her arm through his, Romp leaning against him in recognition, while she exclaimed:

"Bojo, thank Heaven! Save me from this awful woman!"

"What's wrong, what's the matter?" he said, laughing, feeling all at once a delightful glow at the sight of her snapping eyes and breathless, parted lips.

"They've brought me back and tied a dragon to me," she cried indignantly. "I won't stand it. I won't go parading up and down with a keeper, just like an animal in a zoo. It's all mother's doings, and Dolly's, because I miffed her old duke. Send the dragon away, please, Bojo, please."