“Stranger things have happened. But they wouldn’t take you at the alms-house. You are young and capable. I don’t just see you sitting on the bench with the old ladies, knitting socks. It would not become you, Addie. If the worst comes you would go out like a brave little woman and support your husband.” She flashed a frightened look at him; she had no idea that her husband’s difficulties were serious, though she assumed he might be temporarily embarrassed, as men often were, without finding it necessary to change their manner of life. She remembered that the roof over her head belonged to Wayne and she sought to reassure herself as to the permanence of the arrangement by which Colonel Craighill had the use of it. “You wouldn’t let them turn me out-of-doors, would you Wayne?” “Well, if father went broke it would hardly be up to me to carry on the house here; it’s an expensive establishment to run. I might have to sell it myself.” “Yes; I suppose your interests and your father’s are identical. What hurts him would hurt you.” “Not at all! Our interests are anything but identical. We belong”--he said, with an irony that was for his own satisfaction--“we belong to different schools of finance. Father’s a plunger without knowing it; I’m a Wayne and the Waynes were always true Scots and kept what they had and sat on it. Father likes to be director of things, and the things liked to have him. He’s been used a good deal as bait--that’s what it amounts to. He’s just paid about two hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of sitting with a lot of solemn gentlemen up at Boston who organized a big corporation to raise bananas or grape fruit or something in the torrid deserts of Mexico. You know father well enough by this time to understand how that idea would appeal to him--irrigation to water the desert and make it blossom as the rose! I went in for a few thousand and so did Walsh; but we quit, and to-day when I told father I had sold out he was wounded. Tom Walsh is about the shrewdest old party there is around here. We sold out at the same time and both made money.” He laughed softly to himself and slapped his knee. “If you knew your father had got into a bad thing you ought to have told him--don’t you think so?”