Oddly enough he chose this opportunity to discuss with her her business affairs, which was the excuse he had tossed Miss Comstock for abstracting the ward from the rest of the party. He found that she knew almost nothing about the source of her fortune--that lean stretch of sandy acres known as Clark's Field. He related to her the outline of the story of the Field as it has been told in these pages. Adelle listened with a peculiarly blank expression on her pale face. She was in fact trying hard to recall certain distant images of her early life--memories that were neither pleasant nor painful, but very odd to her, so strange that she could not realize herself as having once been the little drudge in the rooming-house on Church Street, with the manager of the livery-stable as the star roomer. While the banker was relating the steps by which she had become an heiress, she was seeing the face of the liveryman and that of the probate judge, who had first taken an active part in her destiny and turned it into its present smooth course.... "So," Mr. Crane was saying, "the bank was finally able to make an arrangement by which the long deadlock was broken and Clark's Field could be sold--put on the market in small lots, you know. Owing to a very fortunate provision, you are the beneficiary of one half of the sales made by the Field Associates, as the corporation is called--whenever they dispose of any of it they pay us for you half the money!" (He neglected to state that this "fortunate provision" was due solely to the shrewdness and probity of Judge Orcutt; that if he and the trust company's president had had their way she would have been obliged to content herself with a much more modest income than she now enjoyed. But doubtless Mr. Crane felt that was irrelevant.) "So you see, little girl," he concluded, in a burst of unguarded enthusiasm, "we are piling up money for you while you are playing over here." As something seemed to be expected of her, Adelle remarked lamely,-- "That is very nice." "Yes," Mr. Crane continued with satisfaction. "You can congratulate yourself on having such good care of your property as we give it.... And let me tell you it didn't look promising at first. There were no end of legal snarls that had to be straightened out--in fact, if I hadn't urged it strongly on the old man I doubt if they would have taken hold of the thing at all!" "Oh," Adelle responded idly, "what was the trouble?" "Why, those other heirs--that Edward S. Clark and his children. If _they_ had turned up we should have been in a pretty mess." "Oh!" "It would have upset everything." "Why?" He had just explained all this, but thinking that women never understood business matters until everything had been explained several times, and anxious to impress the girl with the benefits that she had derived from the guardian which the law had given her, also indirectly from himself, he patiently went all over the point again.