every function where you appear. On the other hand, I shall be very glad when you are Roderick Duncan's wife. He is the son of the best friend I ever had, the only man I ever trusted. And he is every bit as good a man as his father was. He is square and on the level. He has wealth, and he doesn't go bumming around town, giving champagne parties, and monkey dinners. He knows how to be a good fellow without making a fool of himself, and that is more than you can say of most young men who have money to burn. You have grown up together, and why in the world you have kept putting him off is more than I can guess. Besides all that, he is easily worth a hundred millions. But this has nothing to do with the present question. I want you to have him, and I want him to have you; and if he didn't have a dollar in the world, I should feel just the same about it. All that happened to-day was at my instigation; not at his. And now, daughter, you must find it in your heart to forgive him—and me."

She listened to him to the end, quietly and outwardly unmoved. When he concluded, she replied in the same even tone she had used ever since her father entered the library:

"I don't know, and I don't care to know, any of the particulars regarding how the arrangement came about between you and Mr. Duncan. What I do know is this: the arrangement was made between you, and was agreed upon between you. I was called in, to be consulted, at your private office, with the third interested party concealed like a spy in an inner room. I agreed to the transaction as I understood it. I will carry it out as I agreed to do, while at your office, and in no other way. If Roderick Duncan wishes to make me his wife, he must do it according to the stipulations I have dictated to Mr. Melvin, this afternoon, or he can never do it at all. That, sir, is all I have to say."

She turned and went from the room, closing the door behind her as softly as the lawyer had done.

The old man slipped down more deeply into his chair, covered his eyes with one hand, and murmured, audibly:

"I have had to live almost seventy years to find out that, after all, I am nothing but an old fool."

CHAPTER III

A STRANGE BETROTHAL

When dinner was served at seven that Saturday evening, the banker and his daughter faced each other in silence across the table. There was no wife and mother in this money-king's family, for she had passed out of life when Patricia came into the world. This, perhaps, may account for the close intimacy that had always existed in the relations of father and daughter, between whom there had never been any break or shadow, until this particular Saturday afternoon.

"Old Steve," iron-faced, heavy jawed, and steady of eye, wore his Wall-street mask at this particular dinner; and he wore it as grimly as ever he did when encountering a financial storm or a threatened panic. He felt that he had more to conceal, just now, than any financial problem could ever compel him to face. He was no longer "dad." Patricia had practically omitted the use of even the less endearing term of father; but whether intentionally or not, even the shrewd old banker could not determine. For years, he had forgotten that he had a heart, save when he and his daughter were alone together. The money whirlpool of the financial section of the city had made him colder of aspect, harder in nature, and less considerate of the feelings of others. It had never even remotely occurred to him that there could be any rupture between himself and Patricia, or that a yawning gulf, like this one was, could separate them.

But now there was one, and he recognized its breadth and its depth. He knew that he could not cross it to her, and that it would never be bridged, save by Patricia herself. He had offended her beyond forgiveness, almost. He had not entirely realized that Patricia's nature and characteristics were so like his own, save only where they were feminine instead of masculine, that she would now adopt the course he would have pursued under circumstances which might, by a stretch of the imagination, be called parallel.

Patricia's face was almost as mask-like as her father's, save that her great, dark eyes were stormy in their depths, and would have suggested to one who had sailed the Southern seas the brooding and far away approach of a monsoon. Her olive-tinted skin had in it a suggestion of pallor; but only a suggestion. When she spoke at all it was to John, the butler who served them; and then it was always in her accustomed low, evenly modulated tone. Not perceptibly different to the butler were her tone and manner, and yet even the servant, wise in his generation, sensed the unsettled condition of things, and moved about like a phantom; perhaps also he was a trifle more assiduous than usual in his efforts at perfect service.

Patricia ate sparingly, but bravely. There was nothing of the shrinking or pouting, or even of the petulant, in her character. Her father ate nothing at all. He dawdled with his soup, turned his fish over and sent it away, and sniffed contemptuously at everything else that was placed before him. He made his dinner of coffee and cognac, and seemed to be greatly interested while he burned the latter over three dominoes of sugar.

When the moment came to leave the table, there had been no word exchanged between them; but then, with an effort, the banker assumed his brightest and most kindly tone; and he asked, cheerily:

"Well, what have you on for to-night, my dear?"

"Nothing at all," she replied, indifferently, as if the question held no interest for her—as, indeed, it did not, for the moment; but she followed him from the dining-room into the library, as was their usual custom whenever they had dined alone. Now, as they entered it, the banker, with an assumption of high spirits he did not feel, remarked:

"If you don't object to a Saturday-night opera, Garden is singing 'Salome' at the Manhattan to-night, and I should like to hear it. Will you go, with your old dad?"

"No, thank you," she replied, indifferently. "I shall remain at home."

She was standing at the table, turning the leaves of a magazine, and her father glanced keenly at her across the intervening space, while he lighted a cigar. Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, and a sigh which could not have been seen or heard, and which only he himself knew to have existed, he crossed the floor. As he was passing from the room, he said, as indifferently as she had spoken:

"Then, I suppose, I will have to take it in, alone."

"You might ask Roderick to go with you," she threw at him, as he passed into the hallway; but Langdon pretended not to hear, for he called back at her:

"I'll get Beatrice, I think, and ask her to play daughter for me; eh?"

Patricia made no comment upon this suggestion; but having awaited, where she was, the sound of the closing outer door, she slowly crossed the room.

The drop-light at her favorite chair was adjusted, and she began the reading of a new book which someone had placed on the table beside it. She read on and on, apparently with interest, but really without knowing at all what she did read, until more than an hour had passed; and then a card was brought to her.

She glanced at it, although she believed she knew perfectly well what name it bore, before she did so. Her lips tightened for an instant, and she frowned ever so little. But she said to the footman:

"You may bring Mr. Duncan here, James."

Patricia did not rise from her chair when her caller entered the library. Duncan moved toward her eagerly, but meeting her eyes, which she raised quite calmly to his as he crossed the floor, he paused, and remained at about midway of the distance.

"Good evening, Patricia," he said. "I'm awfully glad to have found you at home. I was afraid you might go out before I could get here."

"I expected you," she told him, without returning his salute. "I