"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be, you know!"
"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence, of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"
"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.
It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the threshed-out subject with a belated query.
"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"
"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the columns of the English medical journal.
But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement, that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young Griswold was rich--or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."
What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.