"You can understand now, Bob, feeling toward you as we all do, that this recent family development has not been easy for us to confront. Delight Hathaway is a beautiful girl who possesses, no doubt, admirable qualities. We expect to become warmly attached to her in time. But for all her kinship she is a stranger to us while you are of our own--a brother, friend." For the first time the kind voice faltered. "I have even cherished a hope," it went on in a lower tone, "that perhaps in the future a closer bond might bind you to us. Nothing in the world would have given me greater satisfaction." Bob suddenly felt the blood leap to his face in a crimson flood. He gasped out an incoherent word or two, hoping to check Mr. Galbraith's speech, but no intelligible phrases came to his tongue. "Life is a strangely perverse game, isn't it?"' mused the capitalist. "We build our castles, build them not alone for ourselves but for others, and those we love shatter the structure we have so painstakingly reared and on its ruined site make for themselves castles of their own." His eyes were fixed on the narrowing ribbon of sand over which the car sped. "I--I--have another surprise for you, Bob," he said in a lower tone, without lifting his gaze from the reach of highway ahead. "Cynthia is to be married." "Cynthia!" A chaos of emotions mingled in the word. "Her engagement has been an overwhelming shock to her mother and me," the elder man continued steadily, still without shifting his eyes from the road over which he guided the car, "I don't know why the possibility never occurred to us; but it never did. She is to marry Howard Snelling." A quick wave of revulsion swept over Robert Morton. This, then, was the reason Snelling had filched from Willie his invention,--that he might have greater riches to lay at the feet of his fiancee, and perhaps reach more nearly a financial equality with her family. He saw it all now. And probably it was Snelling's jealousy of himself that had led him to retaliate by heaping his unwelcome attentions on Delight. At last it was clear as day,--Cynthia's growing coldness and her continual trips to and from Belleport in the boatbuilder's company. Robert Morton could have laughed aloud at his own stupidity. The engagement explained, too, Mr. Snelling's confusion and embarrassment at every mention of the Galbraith family. Why, a child might have fathomed the romance! Again Mr. Galbraith was speaking. "And now, Bob, for the last surprise of all. At first, I thought I would delay telling you until the papers were all in shape and ready for signature; but on second thought it seemed a pity to shut you out of the fun. We have all the data prepared to take out a patent on Mr. Spence's motor-boat." Bob felt a sudden sinking of his heart, a stifling of his breath.