"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged, with Mr. Farley's consent to our anticipating the maturity of his notes. But"--with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-glasses--"I'm not sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold it and bid it in." Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's. "I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct." "Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've kept this mighty quiet, among you!" "Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel--like a man who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?" But the president was already pressing the button of the electric bell that summoned the cashier. There was no time like the present when the fate of a considerable bank asset hung on the notion of a smiling young man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye. With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one. When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home--for the first time in two weeks. It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,--counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance. How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon--they gave him his courtesy title now--had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea. It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday: