“What do you mean? Do you think I am going to take your old mine?” Melody fairly shouted. “It’s yours, yours, all yours! You won the first stake with your nerve, and you made the rest of it. And you’ll keep it, too, my friend—at least, most of it. Perhaps some day, when I get the fool-bug in my head, and want a company of my own, I’ll come around and call on you for a couple of hundred thousand.” Brainard looked at the girl almost severely. “All the property is _yours_, of course. Krutzmacht meant it so. Your name was the last word on his lips. I have been merely your guardian. It would be impossible for me to keep it now. You can see that it would be entirely different from what it has been while you were only a name to me.” “I see what _you_ are,” she replied slowly. “The honestest, most generous, most unselfish of men—and the foolishest! Come, let’s stop this swapping of compliments like a couple of children—‘You take it, George!’ ‘No, you take it, Edith!’ . . . So old Pap Krutz wanted me to have his money when he was dying! I suppose he thought to make it square for what he put mother and me through. He treated us like _peons_!” Brainard laughed. “You may think differently about your millions in the morning. We’ll wait till then. Good night, and double congratulations, Melody!” he said. “Yes, we’d quite forgotten how good I was in the play. I’ll send you those papers about mother to-morrow morning, and you see that the scalawags don’t make good! I can’t be bothered with law suits and things until after the season closes. I’m making _my_ great adventure now, the same as you did once! I don’t want to be disturbed until I have carried it through.” “I’ll see that you are not disturbed. Before I go, please tell me why you didn’t let me know the truth when you found that picture in my room?” “I had my idea,” Melody replied vaguely, her eyes shining into his. “I shouldn’t have given it away now—not until I had really made good—if it hadn’t been for that woman winning the law suit. When I discovered what the trouble was, I had to tell, of course.” “I almost wish you hadn’t!” Brainard exclaimed, starting for the door. “Why?” “I think you can tell why!” And he was gone, leaving Melody with a thoughtful smile on her pretty face. “I believe,” she remarked after a time, as in rapid, unstarlike haste she divested herself of her clothes, “that I shall find a way of compelling him to keep the money—somehow or other!” XVIII