She sat down in one of the chairs, now vacant, which had been drawn up to the study table.  The air of the room was heavy with tobacco smoke, and there were empty liqueur glasses upon the sideboard.  Yet Virginia somehow felt that it was not only to take their after-dinner coffee, and enjoy a chat over their cigars, that these men had met together around the table before which she was sitting.  She had the feeling somehow that things had been happening in that little room, of which she and Phineas Duge were now the only occupants.

“Virginia!”

She turned her head suddenly.  Her uncle was looking at her.  His eyes had lost their far-away gleam, and were fixed upon hers, cold and expressionless.

“Yes, uncle!” she said.

“I want to talk to you for a few moments,” he said.  “Listen, and don’t interrupt.”

She leaned a little toward him in an attitude of attention.  The words seemed to frame themselves slowly upon his lips.

“You have been wondering, I suppose, like all the rest of the world,” he began, “why I sent for you here.  I am going to tell you.  But first of all let me know this.  Are you satisfied with what I have done for you, and for your people?  In other words, have you any feeling of what people, I believe, call gratitude towards me?”

“I wonder that you can ask me that,” she answered, a little tremulously.  “You know that I am very, very grateful indeed.”

“You like your life?” he asked.  “You find it”—­he hesitated for a moment—­“more amusing than at Wellham Springs?”

“I am only an ordinary girl,” she answered simply, “and you must realize what the difference means.  Life there was a sort of struggle which led nowhere.  Here I don’t see how any one could be happier than I. Apart from that, what you have done for the others counts, I think, for more than anything with me.”

“I am glad,” he answered, “that you are satisfied.  You think, perhaps, from what you have seen since you came here that the power of money has no limits.  I can tell you that it has very fixed and definite limits, and it was when I realized them that I sent for you.  I hope to gain from you what in all New York I should not know where to buy.”

She was careful not to interrupt him, but her eyes were full of mute questions.

“I mean,” he continued, “fidelity, absolute unswerving fidelity.  The four men who have been here to-night call themselves my friends.  We are leagued together in enterprises of immense importance.  Yet take them one by one, and there is not one whom I can trust.  I have proved it.  I pay my two secretaries more highly than any other employer in the city.  They do their duty, but I know very well that they only wait for some one else to outbid me, and they would take themselves and their knowledge of my affairs to whoever might call them.  It has become necessary that there should be one person in whose charge I can repose the knowledge of certain things.  New York does not hold such a person.  That is why I have sent for you.”