Connie's pertness vanished, and the steadfast gray eyes brightened with quick upwellings of sympathy. "No, dear; it will doubtless be in everybody's mouth before many days. You remember what I told you once about Dick's prospects?--that day we were on top of El Reposo?" "Yes." "Well, I think the Little Myriad isn't going to keep its promise; Dick thinks so." Myra sat quietly under it for a little while, and then got up to go to the window. When she spoke she did not turn her head. "He will be ruined, you said. What will you do, Connie?" "I? What can I do? Poppa would lend him more money, but he wouldn't take it,--not from us." Silence while the bronze-figured clock on the mantel measured a full minute. Then:-- "There is one way you can make him take it." "How?" Myra gave a quick glance over her shoulder, as if to make sure that her cousin was still sitting under the chandelier. "He believes--and so does your father--that it is only a question of time and more money. He couldn't refuse to take his wife's money." Miss Van Vetter heard a little gasp, which, to her strained sense, seemed to be more than half a sob, and the arc-light swinging from its wire across the avenue was blurred for her. Then Connie's voice, soft and low-pitched in the silence of the book-lined room, came to her as from a great distance. "You are quite mistaken, Myra, dear; mistaken and--and very blind. Dick is my good brother,--the only one I ever had; not my father's son, but yet my brother. There has been no thought of anything else between us. Besides"-- Myra heard light footfalls and the rustle of drapery, and stole another quick glance over her shoulder. The big pivot-chair under the chandelier was empty. The door into the hall was ajar, and Connie's face, piquant with suppressed rapture, was framed in the aperture. "Besides, you good, dense, impracticable cuzzy, dear,--are you listening?--Dick is head over ears in love with--you." The door slammed softly on the final word, and there was a quick patter of flying feet on the stairs. Myra kept her place at the window; but when the arc-light had parted with its blurring aureole she drew the big pivot-chair to the desk and sat down to write. What she had in mind seemed not to say itself readily, and there was quite a pyramid of waste paper in the basket before she had finished her two letters. She left them on the hall table when she went up to her room, and Connie found them in the morning on her way to the breakfast-room to pour her father's coffee. "I wish I might read them," she said, with the mischievous light dancing in her eyes. "It's deliciously suspicious; a letter to Dick, and one to her man of business, all in a breath, and right on the heels of my little bomb-shell. If she ever tries to discipline me again,--well, she'd better not, that's all." CHAPTER XXV