"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and--and I'm afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry business with Edward Raymer?" "Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten it myself." "Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly. "Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of it." "What did you think about?" It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less than no chance in an evasive duel with her. "Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle." "Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?" "No; it was my own offer." "But he did tell you that he was in trouble?" "Y-yes," hesitantly. "What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the world to know." Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the daughter of desire, that prompted him to say: "You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you." "Foolish!" she chided--and this time the epithet had lost its alluring softness. "You may as well tell me. Mr. Raymer had borrowed money at poppa's bank. What was the matter? Did he have to pay it back--all at once?" There seemed to be no further opening for evasion. "Yes; I think that was the way of it," he answered. Arguing wholly from the newly made discovery, or postulated discovery, of Raymer's state and standing as an object of Miss Grierson's solicitude, Griswold expected something in the nature of an outburst. What he got was a transfixing glance of the passionate sort, quick with open-eyed admiration. "And you just tossed your money into the breach as if you had millions of it, and by now you've almost forgotten that you did it!" she exclaimed. "Kenneth, dear, there are times when you are so heavenly good that I can hardly believe it. Are there any more men like you over on your side of the world?"