“She’s kind o’ pathetic to me. There’s nothing hard in her. As I said, she’s like glass, and when that kind break it’s just get the broom and sweep out the pieces, that’s all. But I don’t like to hear the tinkle of broken glass. There ain’t much satisfaction in seeing human nature topple and fall off the shelf--men or women. The strong ones, the heavy pottery, can drop hard and roll some; clay’s coarser; but these weak ones--it makes you sick.” Walsh was silent for a moment, then, seeing that he had checked Wingfield, he asked: “How did the situation up there strike you?” “It was proper enough--quite beautiful and domestic. I don’t suppose Wayne ever spent a whole evening at home before in his life. How do you explain the other woman--a sort of chaperone rung in to improve the looks of things?” “It doesn’t make any difference how she got there; that ain’t our business; but I felt better when I saw her there. She’s a good girl; she’s all right.” Walsh’s omniscience would have annoyed Wingfield if he had not so greatly admired it. It seemed that Walsh not only possessed much information as to the private affairs of the Craighill family but that his knowledge covered also the casual stranger within the Craighill gates. “Who’s the girl?” he ventured carelessly; and Walsh’s “Um” seemed for a moment to have been interposed as a rebuff. But Walsh stirred his glass slowly and replied: “It certainly beats hell how things come around. That girl’s grandfather is one of these old fellows that ought to have been rich if he’d had any sense. He owned a lot of coal land around here years ago but he swindled himself out of it in one way or another. He got cleaned out down here and moved up into the anthracite country where he never did any good. He’s got a claim against the Colonel on account of a coal-mining company that the Colonel took over and merged with a lot of other small concerns about ten years ago. He and the Colonel were old friends, and Gregory, this Morley girl’s grandfather, thought the Colonel so great and good that he wouldn’t do even a blind and deaf and dumb beggar in a horse trade. The facts were that the Colonel, being smooth on negotiation and an impressive party to send out to make deals, was ‘used’ right along by the fellows he was in with. The Colonel didn’t know he was doing the other fellow half the time--it was so easy and his associates told him what to do. Gregory was practically the sole owner of the Sand Creek property; he had worked it himself and failed to make any money, and the Colonel offered to take it into the combination just as a favour to an old friend. They wiped out the old Gregory company--took over the stocks and bonds--but the Colonel made a personal agreement with the old man, as a sort of sop, that at the end of ten years, if coal should be mined in the property, he should be paid a royalty. There was no contract--he wrote a letter about it. Well, they’re working Gregory’s property all right--found a