She put the book on the table and looked up at him with something of Connie's steadfastness in her eyes. "Perhaps I was foolish to try to make even such a small mystery of it; but I thought--I was so anxious to--to put it in such a way as to"-- The words would not discover themselves; and Bartrow, to whom the mystery was now no mystery, helped her over the obstruction. "As to make it easy for me. I think I catch on, after so long a time. Mr. Grimsby is your business manager, isn't he?" "My solicitor; yes." "That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?" "Yes." He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration. "It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation." The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between them. "A temptation? Why do you call it that?" Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint. "If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and weep was almost too much for me." "You still call it a temptation." "It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight with myself before I could say no, and mean it." "But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't you?" "Sure. But that's for myself--and for a few people who knew the size of the risk when they staked me. So far as I've gone with it, it's only a big game of chance; and I wouldn't let you put your money into it unless I knew it was the surest kind of a sure thing." "Not if I believe in it, too? Not if I am willing to take the chances that you and the others have taken?" Myra conceived that her mistake lay in putting it upon the ground of a purely business transaction, and changed front with truly feminine adroitness. "Won't you let me have just a tiny share of it? Enough so that when I go back to Philadelphia I can say that I am interested in a mine? I should think you might. I'll promise to be the most tractable and obedient stockholder you have." She made the plea like a spoiled child begging for a toy, but there was no mistaking the earnestness of it. Bartrow felt his fine determination oozing, and was moved to tramp again, making a circuit of the entire room this time, and saying to himself with many emphatic repetitions that it could not be possible,--that her motive was only charitable,--that he was nothing more to her than Connie's friend. When he spoke again his circlings had brought him to the back of her chair.