As she explained her position she looked deliberately past Somerled and out at the window. This made me sure that a vague suspicion of mine was founded on fact. Mrs. Bal had angled for Somerled, and he had been one of her few failures. She couldn't be pleased at encountering him again as her daughter's self-appointed guardian and champion. It seemed to me that the situation complicated itself, to Somerled's disadvantage; therefore--it might be--to the advantage of the next nearest man, myself.
"There is some one," Mrs. Bal went on, with a slight but lessening constraint, "who--rather likes me, and I rather like him--better than I can remember liking anybody. He's got lots of money. His name is Morgan Bennett. Somerled--you know him."
"Yes," said Somerled. "I thought his back looked familiar."
So the big fellow who helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin--and unlimited cheek. He is so big that his pet name in Wall Street used to be "The Little Tin Soldier."
"He has been--dangling lately," Mrs. Bal went on. "Oh, nothing settled! I confess I wish it were. I mean to take him if he asks me, and I think he will. You wouldn't believe it, but he's a shy man with women. I do believe he's frightened to propose. He's bought a house in London, in my favourite square. And now he's taken a shooting-lodge in Forfarshire--such an amusing place: a huge round house with as many eyes as in a peacock's tail, all staring cheerfully, and high chimneys grouped together like bundles of asparagus. I've just been staying there with his sister, Mrs. Payne, whom I believe he imported from America on purpose to play gooseberry. You know--or perhaps you don't--I tried my new play for the first time in Dundee, just one night, and it went gorgeously. This house of his isn't far off, and I was motored back and forth for rehearsals and so on, while the company stayed in town. I simply fell in love with the place; and he's trying to buy it--to please me, I _hope_. There's a round porter's lodge and a round garage: and the round house stands on a round lawn with a round road running round it like a belt, so that it all seems the centre of a round world with the sun moving round it. He brought me from there to Edinburgh to-day, and two of my maids in another car. He won't stop here in the same hotel with me, of course, but he'll drop in now and then--naturally--and he's taken his box at the theatre for the whole week. We must arrange this sister business before he calls. I've confessed to him that I'm twenty-nine, and it's perfectly true. I've been twenty-nine for several years. But he'd hardly believe me so old. And what _should_ I do--I ask you all--if a grown-up--oh, but an extremely grown-up--daughter suddenly loomed over my horizon? Even if I put back her clock to fifteen instead of--never mind!--I couldn't manage to be less than thirty-one, and that with the greatest difficulty. Now you see how I am placed."