pledge is not a matter to slur over with careless haste, but requires due time. And it was but natural that the handclasp should be symbolic of that deliberation. Indeed, it is hard to say just how long his big hand and her little one might have remained clasped together had inclination been allowed to prevail. But, as usual in Hartmann's life, inclination was not consulted. The door behind them opened sharply, and the clasped hands parted as if at a signal. Hartmann slipped back into his chair at the desk, while the girl busied herself with a new and commendable activity in her task of setting the immaculate room to rights.

Both seemed to realise without turning around that one more of their too brief interviews had been unceremoniously cut short.

The man whose advent caused the curtailment of the promise's sealing was as foreign looking as the room itself. Dapper, dressed in a sort of elaborate carelessness, his figure alone carried with it an air of assurance that Hartmann always found almost as irritating as the man's gracefully exaggerated manner and speech. His blonde hair was brushed back from a high, narrow forehead. A turned-up moustache and a close-trimmed and pointed Van Dyke beard added to the foreign aspect.

The newcomer took in the scene with a glance that apparently grasped none of its details. He nodded curtly to Hartmann, then crossed to where the girl was dusting.

CHAPTER II

THE HEIR

"Hello, Kitty," he said. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning, Frederik," responded the girl, and started toward the stairs.

But the man intercepted her. Catching her playfully by the arm he tried to draw her toward him.

"You're pretty as a June rose to-day," he laughed.

Hartmann, instinctively, had half-risen from his chair. The girl, noting his movement and the frown gathering on his face, checked her impulse to retort, quietly disengaged herself from the newcomer's familiar grasp, and ran up the short stair flight that led into the gallery.

In no way offended, the man glanced after her with another short laugh, then turned to Hartmann.

"Where's my uncle?" he asked.

Hartmann looked up with elaborate slowness from the notes he was making of the newly opened mail. His eyes at last rested on the dapper figure before him, with the impersonal, faintly irritated gaze one might bestow on a yelping puppy.

"Mr. Grimm is outside," he answered. "He's watching my father spray the plum trees. The black knot's getting ahead of us this year."

"I wonder," grumbled Frederik, lounging across to the window, "if it's possible once a year to ask a simple question of any inmate of this cursedly dreary old place without getting a botanical answer."

"That's what we are here for—those of us that work," said Hartmann, returning to his note making.

"Work, work, work!" mocked Frederik. "When I inherit my beloved uncle's fortune, I shall buy up all the dictionaries and have that wretched word crossed out of them."

Hartmann made no reply. He did not seem to have heard. But Frederik, absently ripping to atoms a Richmond rose from the window table vase, continued his muttered tirade. An inattentive audience was better than none.

"Work!" he growled. "When people here aren't talking about it, they're doing it. Grubby, earthy work. And it was to prepare for this sort of thing that I loafed through Leyden and Heidelberg! Yes, and loafed through, creditably, too; even if Oom Peter did bully me into making a specialty of botany. Botany! Dry as dust. After the University and after my wanderjahr, I thought it would be another easy task to come here, and 'learn the business.' Easy! As easy as the treadmill. And as congenial."

"I wonder you don't tell Mr. Grimm all that. I'm sure it would interest him."

"My dear, worthy uncle, who builds such wonderful hopes on me? Not I. It would break his noble heart. I hope you quite understand, Hartmann, that I keep quiet only through fear of wounding him and not with any fear that he might bequeath the business elsewhere."

"Quite," returned Hartmann drily. "That's why I keep my mouth shut when he holds you up to me as a paragon of zeal and industry and asks me why I don't pattern myself after you. But, for all that, you're taking chances when you talk to me about him as you do."

"I'm not," contradicted Frederik. "I may not know botany. But I know men. You love me about as much as you love smallpox. But you belong to the breed that doesn't tell tales. Besides, I've got to speak the truth to some one, once in a while, if I don't want to explode. You're a splendid safety valve, Hartmann."

The secretary bent over his notes. His forehead veins swelled, and his face darkened. But he gave no overt sign of offence. Frederik, watching keenly, seemed disappointed.

"In New York," he pursued with a sigh, "they're just about thinking of waking up. And look at the time I'm routed out of bed! Say, Hartmann, I wish you would give Oom Peter a hint to oil his shoes. Every morning he wakes me up at five o'clock, creaking down the stairs. It's a sort of pedal alarm clock. Creak! Creak! Creak!—Ach, Gott! Even yet I can hardly keep one eye open. If ever it pleases Providence to give me my heritage, the first thing I'll do will be to sleep till noon. And then to go to sleep again."

He stared moodily out of the window into the glowing, flower-starred June world.

"How I loathe this pokey, dead old village!" he complained. "And what wouldn't I give to be back with the old Leyden crowd for one little night!"

He lurched over to the piano, sat carelessly, sidewise, on its stool, and, thrumming at the keyboard, fell to humming in a slurring, reminiscent fashion, the old Leyden University chorus:

"Ach, daar koonet ye amuseeren! Io vivat—Io vivat
Nostorum sanitas, hoc estamoris porculum,
Dolores est anti gotum—Io vivat—Io vivat
Nostorum sanitas—!

"Say, Hartmann," he broke off from his jumble of Dutch and Hollandised Latin, "the old man is aging. He's aging fast."

"Who?" asked Hartmann absently, glancing up from his work. "Oh, your uncle? Yes, he is mellowing. He is changing foliage with the years."

"Changing foliage? Not he. He changes nothing. What was good enough forty years ago seems to him quite good enough to-day. He's as old-fashioned as his hats. And they're the oldest things since Noah's time. He's just as old-fashioned in his financial ways. In my opinion, for instance, this would be a capital time to sell out the business. But he——"

"Sell out?" echoed Hartmann in genuine horror. "Sell out a business that's been in his family for—why, man, he'd as soon sell his soul. This business is his religion."

"Yes, and that's why it is so flourishing in spite of his back-date customs. It's at the very acme of its prosperity now. Why, the plant must be worth an easy half million. Yes, and more. Lord, but it would sell now! One, two, three,—Augenblick! By the way, speaking of selling,—what was the last offer the dear old gentleman turned down from Hicks of Rochester?"

But Hartmann did not hear the question. He was staring at Frederik in open-mouthed astonishment.

"Sell out?" he repeated dully. "This is a new one—even from you. There isn't a day your uncle doesn't tell me how triumphantly you are going to carry on the business after he is gone. He——"