Another event of this new year was perhaps even more momentous to Adelle than the arrival of the little Mexican, and that was the visit paid to her shortly after her sixteenth birthday by one of the trust company's officers. It was Mr. Ashly Crane--the new trust officer, in fact--who rode up the winding avenue from the river road in one of the noisy, new-fangled motors that announced itself from afar. Mr. Gardiner, it seemed, had been retired from his position as trust officer and was no longer to be the human symbol of Adelle's wardship to the trust company. The new trust officer had not of design chosen the occasion of the ward's birthday to pay her a visit. Happening to be in the neighboring city of Albany with a few hours on his hands before he could make connections for the West, he bethought himself of the trust company's young charge and ran out to look over the school and incidentally Adelle. No one from the Washington Trust Company had ever paid its ward a visit,--Adelle was the only unvisited girl in the school,--but Mr. Ashly Crane was the kind of vigorous young banker, not yet quite forty, who could be depended upon to "keep in personal touch" with all his clients. That is why, probably, he had superseded Mr. Gardiner, who had a staid habit of relying upon printed forms and the mail. Mr. Ashly Crane was a good-looking, keen American banker, who paid strict attention to his manners, clothes, and habits. He was ambitious, of course, and had been so busily climbing upwards from his first clerkship in the trust company that he had not yet married. Very likely he felt that with his ever-widening horizon of prospects it would not be wise to anchor himself socially to any woman, who might prove to be a drag upon his future. He was still well within the marriageable limits and looked even younger. Nothing so well preserves youth as Success, and of this tonic Mr. Ashly Crane had had an abundance. Mr. Crane, it should not be thought, had armed himself with a bunch of enormous red roses from the leading florist of Albany and set forth upon his expedition with any formulated plot against the little heiress who was the company's ward. He recalled her in fact as a most unattractive, gawky little girl, who must have changed inconceivably for the better if she were to interest Mr. Ashly Crane personally. But the Clark estate, under the skillful method of treatment for which he was largely responsible, was growing all the time, and thanks to the probate judge's precaution, Adelle would ultimately reap rather more than one half of the earnings of the Clark's Field Associates. Already her expenses, represented by the liberal checks to Herndon Hall, were a mere nothing in the total of the income that went on rolling up in conservative bonds and stocks that were safely stowed away in the vaults under the Washington Trust Company. It seemed only proper that the sole representative of so much