“Will you tell me, Jimmy, just what you expect to gain, then, by this remarkable adventure, as you call it?” the woman asked quizzically. “Decidedly I will tell you. I gain the one thing I need most, just now—a name. My own—but I have never told you what my own really was, have I? No; and there is no use going into that, now—but my own name has been so long abandoned that I have forgotten the use of it; especially the application of it. The name that has been given me by the police of various localities, isn’t sufficiently high-sounding; and——” “No. Bare-Faced Jimmy is hardly a name to have engraved upon one’s cards,” she interrupted him. “——and, as I was saying, James Duryea, who has been called Bare-Faced Jimmy, is popularly supposed to lie buried on an island in the Sound, just off South Norwalk, Connecticut. I would much rather that the police should not be undeceived about that, and so we will let Jimmy Duryea, cracksman, lie there and rot; eh?” “If you please. I don’t mind. A rose by any other name, you know.” “Yes; I know. And that reminds me. In the future I will thank you to address me as Ledger. Eh? By Jove! Juno, that chap in there was the most unbalanced ledger I ever saw in my life. If he hadn’t sort of come to, during the last hours of his life, and told all he ever knew about himself and his people, this idea would never have occurred to me.” “It looks to me like a fool idea, anyhow,” she commented, with a toss of her beautiful and shapely head, crowned as it was with a wealth of raven-black hair. Juno was undeniably a beautiful woman—a fact of which she was perfectly well aware. “Fool idea?” he retorted. “Not much. It’s a splendid one. It is the idea of my life, and it is worth about three or four times as much as it would have been had the chap in there left a million in money and unencumbered estates behind him when he died. I would rather have his debts than a fortune that he might have left. Really, I don’t think that I would have undertaken the thing if he had left property that was worth anything.” “Why?” “Why, to what, Juno?” “Why is the name and the identity of that poor fellow worth more to you, so, than if he had left a fortune behind him?” “Why? Can you, my dear, ask such a question as that?” “I do ask it.” “Then know this: Nobody will want what Dinwiddie has left behind him. No one will be desirous of shouldering his debts; and consequently nobody will step forward to dispute the rights that I shall assert belong to me. Word will travel around the neighborhood, and throughout the county, that Ledger Dinwiddie has come back; then there will be a few convulsive shrugs of a few shoulders, a score or so of knowing winks—and that will be about all. On the other hand, if there was property, there would be a hundred disinterested persons, neighbors and otherwise, who would find a chance to doubt if I were the real Dinwiddie returned to what had once been his own.” “But what do you get out of it, Jimmy?”