this—from young Valiant.” He passed over a letter.

Fargo read. He looked up. “Securities aggregating three millions!” he said in a hushed voice. “Why, unless I’ve been misinformed, that represents practically all his private fortune.”

The other nodded. “Turned over to the Corporation with his resignation as a vice-president, and without a blessed string tied to ’em! What do you think of that?”

“Think! It’s the most absurdly idiotic thing I ever met. Two weeks ago, before the investigation ... but now, when it’s perfectly certain they can bring nothing home to him—” He paused. “Of course I suppose it’ll save the Corporation, eh? But it may be ten years before its securities pay dividends. And this is real money. Where the devil does he come in meanwhile?”

The receiver pursed his lips. “I knew his father,” he said. “He had the same crazy quixotic streak.”

He gathered the scattered documents and locked them carefully with the satchel in a safe. “Spectacular young ass!” he said explosively.

“I should say so!” agreed Fargo. “Do you know, I used to be afraid my Katharine had a leaning toward him. But thank God, she’s a sensible girl!”

CHAPTER III

THE NEVER-NEVER LAND

Dusk had fallen that evening when John Valiant’s Panhard turned into a cross-street and circled into the yawning mouth of his garage. Here, before he descended, he wrote a check on his knee with a slobbering fountain-pen.

“Lars,” he said to the chauffeur, “as I dare say you’ve heard, things have not gone exactly smoothly with me lately, and I’m uncertain about my plans. I’ve made arrangements to turn the car over to the manufacturers, and take back the old one. I must drive myself hereafter. I’m sorry, but you must look for another place.”

The dapper young Swede touched his cap gratefully as he looked at the check’s figures. Embarrassment was burning his tongue. “I—I’ve heard, sir. I’m sure it’s very kind, sir, and when you need another....”

“Thank you, Lars,” said Valiant, as he shook hands, “and good luck. I’ll remember.”

Lars, the chauffeur, looked after him. “Going to skip out, he is! I thought so when he brought that stuff out of the safe-deposit. Afraid they’ll try to take the boodie away from him, I guess. The papers seem to think he’s rotten, but he’s been a mighty good boss to me. He’s a dead swell, all right, anyhow,” he added pridefully, as he slid the car to its moorings, “and they’ll have to get up early to catch him asleep!”

A little later John Valiant, the bulldog at his heels, ascended the steps of his club, where he lodged—he had disposed of his bachelor apartment a fortnight ago. The cavernous seats of the lounge were all occupied, but he did not pause as he strode through the hall. He took the little pile of letters the boy handed him at the desk and went slowly up the stairway.

He wandered into the deserted library and sat down, tossing the letters on the magazine-littered table. He had suddenly remembered that it was his twenty-fifth birthday.

In the reaction from the long strain he felt physically spent. He thought of what he had done that afternoon with a sense of satisfaction. A reversal of public judgment, in his own case, had not entered his head. He knew his world—its comfortable faculty of forgetting, and the multitude of sins that wealth may cover. To preserve at whatever personal cost the one noble monument his father’s genius had reared, and to right the wrong that would cast its gloomy shadow on his name—this had been his only thought. What he had done would have been done no matter what the outcome of the investigation. But now, he told himself, no one could say the act had been wrung from him. That, he fancied, would have been his father’s way.

Fancied—for his recollections of his father were vague and fragmentary. They belonged wholly to his pinafore years. His early memories of his mother were, for that matter, even more unsubstantial. They were of a creature of wonderful dazzling gowns, and more wonderful shining jewels, who lived for the most part in an over-sea city as far away as the moon (he was later to identify this as Paris) and who, when she came home—which was not often—took him driving in the park and gave him chocolate macaroons. He had always held her in more or less awe and had breathed easier when she had departed. She had died in Rome a year later than his father. He had been left then without a near relative in the world and his growing years had been an epic of nurses and caretakers, a boys’ school on the continent, and a university course at home. As far as his father was concerned, he had had only his own childish recollections.

He smiled—a slow smile of reminiscence—for there had come to him at that moment the dearest of all those memories—a play of his childhood.

He saw himself seated on a low stool, watching a funny old clock with a moon-face, whose smiling lips curved up like military mustachios, and wishing the lazy long hands would hurry. He saw himself stealing down a long corridor to the door of a big room strewn with books and papers, that through some baleful and mysterious spell could not be made to open at all hours. When the hands pointed right, however, there was the “Open Sesame”—his own secret knock, two fierce twin raps, with one little lonesome one afterward—and this was unfailing. Safe inside, he saw himself standing on a big, polar-bear-skin rug, the door tight-locked against all comers, an expectant baby figure, with his little hand clasped in his father’s. The white rug was the magic entrance to the Never-Never Country, known only to those two.

He could hear his own shrill treble:

“Wishing-House, Wishing-House, where are you?”

Then the deeper voice (quite unrecognizable as his father’s) answering:

“Here I am, Master; here I am!”

And instantly the room vanished and they were in the Never-Never Land, and before them reared the biggest house in the world, with a row of white pillars across its front a mile high.

Valiant drew a deep breath. Some magic of time and place was repainting that dead and dusty infancy in sudden delicate lights and filmy colors. What had been but blurred under-exposures on the retina of his brain became all at once elfin pictures, weird and specter-like as the dissolving views of a camera obscura.

He and his father had lived alone in Wishing-House. No one else had possessed the secret. Not his mother. Not even the more portentous person whom he had thought must own the vast hotel in which they lived (in such respect did she seem to be held by the servants), who wore crackling black silk and a big bunch of keys for a sole ornament, and who had called him her “lamb.” No, in the Never-Never Land there had been only his father and he!

Yet they were anything but lonely, for the country was inhabited by good-natured friendly savages, as black as a lump of coal, most of them with curly white hair. These talked a queer language, but of course his father and he could understand them perfectly. These savages had many curious and enthralling customs and strange cuddling songs that made one sleepy, and all these his father knew by heart. They lived in little square huts around Wishing-House, made of sticks, and had dozens and dozens of children who wore no clothes and liked to dance in the sun and eat cherries. They were very useful barbarians, too,