darned if I can."

The banker took the cigar from his mouth, flicked the ashes into the cuspidor, removed his leg from the table, and replied calmly, with a half-smile:

"It looks to me as if it were all fixed up, now. Patricia has agreed to marry you all right; she told me in plain English that I could deliver the goods. You heard her, didn't you? As far as I can see, she has only raised the ante just a little—a small matter of ten millions, which you won't mind at all. What's the matter with you, anyhow? You get what you wanted—Patricia's consent to an early marriage." The old man grinned maddeningly at his companion.

"Confound you!" shouted Duncan, starting to his feet, and he smashed one hand down upon the top of the table, in the intensity of the resentment he felt at this remark.

"Do you suppose—damn you!—that I want her like that? Can't you see how the whole thing outraged her? She hates me now, with every fibre of her being. She hates me, and you, too, for this day's work!"

Langdon shrugged his shoulders.

"You want her, don't you?" he asked, placidly, as if he were inquiring about a quotation on 'change.

"Of course, I want her. God only knows how greatly I want her."

"Well, you get her, don't you, by this transaction? She'll keep the terms of the agreement. She's enough like me for that. She said I could deliver the goods. She meant it, too. You get her, don't you?"

"Yes—but how?" was the sulky reply. "How do I get her? What will she do to me, after I do get her? Tell me that, confound you!"

The old man chuckled again. "I am not a mind-reader," he said.

"What will she do to me, Uncle Steve? What did she threaten? What am I to expect from her, now?"

"Oh, I don't know. I confess that I don't. Sometimes, Patricia is a little too much for the old man, Roderick," he added, wistfully. Then, with another change of manner, he exclaimed: "But you get her! And I get the twenty-millions credit. What more can either of us ask? Eh?"

"The twenty millions have nothing to do with it, and you know it. They never did have anything to do with it, and you know that, also. It was only your cursed suggestion, that we should make her promise to marry me the condition of keeping you from failure. You know as well as I do that there is nothing belonging to me which you cannot have at any time, for the asking; and that you do not stand, and have not stood, in any more danger of failure than I do."

"I would have failed if I had not known where to get the credit for the twenty millions," the banker remarked, quietly.

"Yes; but—confound it—you did know. You only had to ask me. But instead of doing it in a straight, business-like way, you set that horrible fly to buzzing in my ears, that we could make use of the circumstance to compel Patricia to an immediate consent. And I, like a fool, listened to you. Patricia never meant not to marry me; but now—!"

He strode across the floor, then back again to his chair and flung himself into it. The old man watched him warily, keen-eyed, observant, and with a certain expression of fondness that no one but his daughter and this young man had ever compelled from him. But, presently, he emitted another chuckling laugh; and said:

"That was a sharp stroke of hers to have the ten millions paid over to her. It was worthy of her old dad; eh? She is a bright one, all right. She's a chip off the old block, my boy. I couldn't have done it better, myself."

"Damn you!" Duncan exclaimed, and he sprang to his feet, grasped his hat, and rushed from the office to the street with much more apparent excitement than Patricia herself had shown. He had the feeling that he had allowed himself to be tricked into the commission of an unmanly act, and he was thoroughly ashamed of it.

Stephen Langdon, left alone, chuckled again, although his face quickly fell into that reposeful, mask-like expression which was habitual to it—an expression not to be changed by the loss or gain of millions. He remained for a time quietly in the chair he had been occupying, but soon he rose and crossed to his desk, throwing back the top of it. He pulled a bundle of papers from one of the pigeonholes and calmly examined certain portions of them. He glanced over three letters left there by his stenographer for him to sign and post. These he signed, and after enclosing them in their respective envelopes, dropped them lightly into a side-pocket of his coat. Then, he pulled toward him the bracket that held the telephone, and placed the receiver against his ear. Having presently secured the desired number, he said:

"I wish to speak with Mr. Melvin, personally."

"Mr. Melvin is not in his office at the present moment," came the reply over the telephone. "Who is it, please?"

"This is Stephen Langdon, and I wanted to speak—"

He was interrupted by the person at the other end of the wire, who uttered an exclamation of surprise, followed by these words:

"Why, Mr. Langdon, Mr. Melvin has gone to your house to see you, as we supposed. A telephone call came from your residence, and he departed at once, saying that he would not return to the office to-day."

"The devil he did!" exclaimed the banker, as he hung up the receiver. Then, he leaned back in his chair and smoked hard for a moment, with the nearest approach to a frown that had appeared on his face during all that exciting afternoon; and he did another thing unusual with him: he spoke aloud his thoughts, with no one but himself for listener.

"I'll be blowed if I thought Patricia would go as far as that!" was what he said. "If she hasn't sent for Malcolm Melvin to draw those papers she hinted at, I'm a Dutchman! By Jove, I begin to think that Duncan was right after all, and that he is up against it in this little play we have had this afternoon. But I hadn't an idea that my girl would go quite so far. H'm! It looks as if it is up to me to spoil her interview with Melvin, if I can get there in time."

Five minutes later, he left the banking-house, paused at a letter-box long enough to drop in the correspondence he had signed, and then went swiftly onward to the subway, by which he was conveyed rapidly to the vicinity of his home. Somewhat later, when he entered the sumptuously appointed library, he discovered precisely what he had expected to find: his lawyer, Malcolm Melvin, and his daughter Patricia were facing each other across the table, the former having before him several sheets of paper, which were already covered with the penciled notes and memoranda he had evidently been engaged in making.

Langdon stopped in the middle of the floor and looked at them. For the first time since the beginning of the interview with his daughter at the office, he realized that she had been in deadly earnest at its close. He understood, suddenly, how deeply her pride had been wounded, and he knew that she was enough like himself to resent it with all the power she could command.

"Since when, Melvin, have you ceased to be my attorney!" he inquired sharply, determined to put an end to the scene, at once.

The elderly lawyer and the young woman had raised their heads from earnest conversation when Stephen Langdon entered the room. The lawyer, with a startled, although amused, expression on his professional face; the daughter with a cold smile and an almost imperceptible nod of her shapely, Junoesque head. But her black eyes snapped with something very nearly approaching defiance, and she replied, before Melvin could do so:

"Do not misunderstand the situation, please," she said, quickly. And her father noticed with deep misgiving that she omitted the customary term of endearment between them. "Mr. Melvin is here at my request, and because he is your attorney. I have been instructing him how to draw the papers that are to accompany the collateral offered for your loan, and the bonus that goes with it; and just how those papers are to be used, in accordance with the discussion between you and me, at the bank, this