She was immensely relieved, as she passed through, to see the clerks working as if nothing particular had happened. On entering her father's room, she found him pacing up and down the apartment, while her cousin sat, apparently absorbed in his own affairs, at his desk. Her father was evidently greatly excited. 'Edith,' he cried the moment she entered, 'where is that money I gave you two years ago?' 'It is invested,' she answered, turning slightly pale. Her father laughed--a hoarse, dry laugh. 'Just as I thought,' he sneered--'put in such shape that a person cannot touch a penny of it, I suppose. In what is it invested? I must have that money.' 'How soon do you need it, father? 'I want it just now, at this moment; if I don't have that money I am a ruined man.' 'This moment. I suppose, means any time to-day, before the bank closes?' Her father looked at her for a moment, then said: 'Yes that is what it means. 'I will try and get you the money before that time.' 'My dear girl,' he said bitterly, 'you don't know what you are talking about. If you have that money invested, even if your investment is worth three times now what it was then, you could not get a penny on it. Don't you know the state of the London money market? Don't you know how close money is? I thought perhaps you might have some portion of it yet, not sunk in your silly investment, whatever it is. I have never asked you what it was. You told me you would tell me, but you never have done so. I looked on that money as lost. I look on it still as lost. If you can get me a remnant of it, it will help me now more than the whole amount, or double the amount, would have done at the time I gave it to you. What have you done with the money? What is it invested in?' 'It is invested in a mine.' 'A mine. Of all things in the world in which to sink money, a mine is the worst. Just what a woman or a fool would do! How do you expect to raise money on a mine in the present state of the market? What, in the name of wonder, made you put it into a mine? Whose mine did you buy?' 'I do not know whose it was, father, but I was willing to tell you all I knew at the time you asked me and if you ask me now what mine I bought, I will tell you.' 'Certainly I ask you. What mine did you buy?' 'I bought the mine for which John Kenyon was agent.' The moment these words were said, her cousin sprang to his feet and glared at her like a man demented. 'You bought that mine--you? Then Wentworth lied to me. He said a Mr. Smith had given him the money.' 'I am the Mr. Smith, William.' 'You are the Mr. Smith! You are the one who has cheated me out of that mine!' 'My dear cousin, the less we say about cheating, the better. I am talking to my father just now, and I do not wish to be interrupted. Will you be so kind as to leave the room until my interview with him is over?'