"Oh, but you see," he reminded her, "the governor couldn't go into everything that was offered him, and to this plan he never urged any objection but that he had too many irons in the fire." "I wouldn't touch it," declared Agnes, and that was her final word in the matter, despite all his arguments. If John Burnit had declined to go into it, no matter for what reason, the plan was not worth considering. CHAPTER VIII BOBBY SUCCEEDS IN SNAPPING A BARGAIN FROM UNDER SILAS TRIMMER'S NOSE Still undecided, but carrying seriously the thought that he must overlook no opportunity if he was to prove himself the successful man that his father had so ardently wished him to become, Bobby dropped into the Idlers' Club for lunch, where Nick Allstyne and Payne Winthrop hailed him as one returned from the dead. "Just the chap," declared Nick. "Stan Rogers has written me that I'm to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat pretense." "Sorry, Nick," said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his steadfastness to duty, "but I know what Stan's stag affairs are like. It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time from the city." "Business again!" groaned Payne in mock dismay. "This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, it's positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you over three million." "Two hundred and fifty thousand, so far as I'm allowed to inquire just now," corrected Bobby; "and I'm ordered to go into business with that and prove that I'm not such a blithering idiot that I can't be trusted with the rest of it, whatever there is." "But I thought you'd had your trial by fire and pulled out of it," interposed Nick. "I heard that you had sold your interests or something, and when I saw a new sign over the store I knew that it was true. Sensible thing, I call it." "Sensible!" winced Bobby. "You're allowing me a mighty pleasant way out of it, but the fact of the matter is that I lost in such a stinging way I'm bound to get back into the game and do nothing else until I win," and he explained how Silas Trimmer had performed upon him a neat and delicate operation in commercial surgery. They were properly sympathetic; not that they cared much about business, but if Bobby had entered any game whatsoever in which he had been soundly beaten, they could quite understand his desire to stay in that game until he could show points on the right side. "Nevertheless," Nick urged, "you ought to take a little breathing spell in between."