"Mr. Burnit," he announced, after a gravity of thought which he strove his best to make take the place of experience, "you ought to be able to buy this hill very cheaply. Just through here we'll construct our drainage channel, and with the excavation fill your marsh. It is one of the neatest opportunities I have ever seen, and I want to congratulate you upon your shrewdness in having picked out such a splendid investment." This, Bobby felt, was praise from Caesar, and he was correspondingly elated. He did not return to the study until in the afternoon. He found Johnson livid with abhorrence of Applerod's gaudy metamorphosis. That gentleman wore a black frock-coat, a flowered gray waistcoat, pin-striped light trousers, shining new shoes, sported a gold-headed cane, and on the table was the glistening new silk hat which had reposed upon his snow-white curls. His pink face was beaming as he rose to greet his partner. "Mr. Burnit," said he, shaking hands with almost trembling gravity and importance, "this day is the apex of my life, and I'm happy to have the son of my old and revered employer as my partner." "I hope that it may prove fortunate for both of us," replied Bobby, repressing his smile at the acquisition of the "make-up" which Applerod had for years aspired to wear legitimately. Johnson, humped over the desk that had once been Bobby's father's, snorted and looked up at the stern portrait of old John Burnit; then he drew from the index-file which he had already placed upon the back of that desk a gray-tinted envelope which he handed to Bobby with a silence that was more eloquent than words. It was inscribed: _To my Son if he is Fool Enough to Take up With Applerod's Swamp Scheme_ Rather impatiently Bobby tore it open, and on the inside he found: "When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch proposition, don't even try to find out what's the matter with it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs loose for twenty-four hours." "If the governor had only arranged to leave me his advice beforehand instead of afterward," Bobby complained to Agnes Elliston that evening, "it might have a chance at me." "The blow has fallen," said Agnes with mock seriousness; "but you must remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to _me_ of your father's carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that very point." "_Not_ in a gray envelope, I hope," groaned Bobby. "_In_ a gray envelope," she replied firmly, going across to her own desk in the library. "I had feared," said Bobby dismally, "that sooner or later I should find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in Johnson's, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they would be in pink envelopes."