"Kate, I wouldn’t think of such a thing!" cried Rosemary, biting her lips. "Now go on. There’s Noel calling for you to go home!"
"As if she could mislead me," said Rosemary to herself. "She wouldn’t even try if she could have seen her own face when I said, on purpose to try her, ’There’s Noel calling you to go home.’ Well, bless her dear heart! I hope her love-affair will turn out as luckily as mine has, and without all my misery. Good-bye, all!"
Perhaps, as a student of human nature, Roscoe Howard rather looked forward with enjoyment to his encounter with Colonel Yancey in the matter of the purchase of Guildford. With the promptness and decision which gave the fundamental strength to his character, he at once investigated the whole transaction, beginning with the private history of the syndicate, which, in his bitterness, Sherman Lee was only too ready to give him. He drew from Carolina, by adroit conversations, much of the story of Colonel Yancey’s connection with the Lee family abroad, and, to a man with an imagination, he soon was able to formulate, though by a somewhat elliptical process, a theory concerning Colonel Yancey’s designs on Carolina, which fitted the case as it stood, but which needed a personal interview with the colonel to enable Mr. Howard to decide whether the man was anxious to marry Carolina from love of herself alone or with the ulterior motive of having discovered some unsuspected source of wealth on the Guildford estate.
"This man is a very accomplished rascal!" he said to himself, as he followed the winding clues in the labyrinth of the colonel’s transactions. "I feel sure that Sherman’s money is done for. He will never get any of that back. Yet Yancey, rascal as he is, is too shrewd to put himself in the clutches of the law. However, he is also clever enough to be willing to have Sherman think him a fool for failing. At the same time, I believe that Yancey has made a fortune. The question is, where is it?"
He fell to musing on the man’s extraordinary career. Serving governments with honesty for years, waiting, studying, learning, biding his time until he could make a grand haul without fear of detection, with his honourable career to throw suspicion off the scent, and finding his quarry at last in wrecking the orphaned children of his best friend.