“What sort of a woman is she?” asked Lucy,

“I don’t know anything about her,” he replied.

There was a silence again.  Finally Montague said, “There is no cause to be sorry for him, you understand.”

And Lucy touched his hand lightly with hers.

“That’s all right, Allan,” she said.  “Don’t worry.  I am not apt to make the same mistake twice.”

It seemed to Montague that there was nothing to be said after that.

CHAPTER II

Lucy wanted to come down to Montague’s office to talk business with him; but he would not put her to that trouble, and called the next morning at her apartment before he went down town.  She showed him all her papers; her father’s will, with a list of his property, and also the accounts of Mr. Holmes, and the rent-roll of her properties in New Orleans.  As Montague had anticipated, Lucy’s affairs had not been well managed, and he had many matters to look into and many questions to ask.  There were a number of mortgages on real estate and buildings, and, on the other hand, some of Lucy’s own properties were mortgaged, a state of affairs which she was not able to explain.  There were stocks in several industrial companies, of which Montague knew but little.  Last and most important of all, there was a block of five thousand shares in the Northern Mississippi Railroad.

“You know all about that, at any rate,” said Lucy.  “Have you sold your own holdings yet?”

“No,” said Montague.  “Father wished me to keep the agreement as long as the others did.”

“I am free to sell mine, am I not?” asked Lucy.

“I should certainly advise you to sell it,” said Montague.  “But I am afraid it will not be easy to find a purchaser.”

The Northern Mississippi was a railroad with which Montague had grown up, so to speak; there was never a time in his recollection when the two families had not talked about it.  It ran from Atkin to Opala, a distance of about fifty miles, connecting at the latter point with one of the main lines of the State.  It was an enterprise which Judge Dupree had planned, as a means of opening up a section of country in the future of which he had faith.

It had been undertaken at a time when distrust of Wall Street was very keen in that neighbourhood; and Judge Dupree had raised a couple of million dollars among his own friends and neighbours, adding another half-million of his own, with a gentlemen’s agreement among all of them that the road would not ask favours of Northern capitalists, and that its stock should never be listed on the Exchanges.  The first president had been an uncle of Lucy’s, and the present holder of the office was an old friend of the family’s.

But the sectional pride which had raised the capital could not furnish the traffic.  The towns which Judge Dupree had imagined did not materialise, and the little railroad did not keep pace with the progress of the time.  For the last decade or so its properties had been depreciating and its earnings falling off, and it had been several years since Montague had drawn any dividends upon the fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock for which his father had paid par value.