Ruggles put his cigar down on the edge of the table. He looked at his chair meditatively, he took out his silk handkerchief, polished up his glasses, readjusted them, put them on and then looked at her. “Now,” he said, “I am going to trust you with something, and I know you will keep my secret for me. This shows you a little bit of what I think about you. Dan Blair hasn’t got a red cent. He has nothing but what I give him. There’s a false title to all that land on the Bentley claim. The whole thing came up when I was home and the original company, of which I own three-quarters of the stock, holds the clear titles to the Blairtown mines. It all belongs now to me, if I choose to present my documents. Dan knows nothing about this—not a word.” The actress had never come up to such a dramatic point in any of her plays. With her hands folded in her lap she looked at him steadily, and he could not understand the expression that crossed her face. He heard her exclamation: “Oh, gracious!” “I’ve brought the papers back with me,” said the Westerner, “and it is between you and me how we act. If Dan marries you I will be bound to do what old Blair would have done—cut him off—let him feel his feet on the ground, and the result of his own folly.” He had taken his glasses off while he made this assertion. Now he put them on again. “If you give him up I’ll divide with the boy and be rich enough still to hand over to my wife all she wants to spend.” She turned her face away from him and leaned her head once more upon her hands. He heard her softly murmuring under her breath, with an absent look on her face, accompanied by a still more incomprehensible smile. “That’s how it stands,” he concluded. She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, and he caught his breath when she turned about abruptly and said: “My goodness, how Dan will hate being poor! He will have to sell all his stickpins and his motor cars and all the things he has given me. It will be quite a little to start on, but he will hate it, he is so very smart.” “Why, you don’t mean to say—” Ruggles gasped. And with a charming smile as she rose to put their conversation at an end, she said: “Why, you don’t mean to say that you thought I _wouldn’t stand by him_?” She seemed, as she put her hands upon her hips with something of a defiant look at the older man, as though she just then stood by her pauperized lover. “I thought you cared some for the boy,” Ruggles said. “Well, I am showing it.” “You want to ruin him to show it, do you?” As though he thought the subject dismissed he walked heavily toward the door. “You know how it stands. I have nothing more to say.” He knew that he had signally failed, and as a sudden resentment rose in him he exclaimed, almost brutally: “I am darned glad the old man is dead; I am glad his mother’s dead, and I am glad I have got no son.”