He looked so insolent as he sat back with half-closed eyes and stroked his silken, black moustache that his father lost his temper.

“I know nothing about your affairs of one kind,” he burst out angrily, “and I do not wish to know; but I want to tell you that I think you are making an ass of yourself to be hanging around that Wentworth woman, having every one talking about you and laughing at you.”

The young man’s dark face flushed angrily.

“What’s that?” he said sharply.

“She is another man’s wife.  Why don’t you let her alone?” pursued the father.

“For that very reason,” said Ferdy, recovering his composure and his insolent air.

“——­ it!  Let the woman alone,” said his father.  “Your fooling around her has already cost us the backing of Wentworth & Son—­and, incidentally, two or three hundred thousand.”

The younger man looked at the other with a flash of rage.  This quickly gave way to a colder gleam.

“Really, sir, I could not lower myself to measure a matter of sentiment by so vulgar a standard as your ——­ money.”

His air was so intolerable that the father’s patience quite gave way.

“Well, by ——! you’d better lower yourself, or you’ll have to stoop lower than that.  Creamer, Crustback & Company are out with us; the Wentworths have pulled out; so have Kestrel and others.  Your deals and corners have cost me a fortune.  I tell you that unless we pull through that deal down yonder, and unless we get that railroad to earning something, so as to get a basis for rebonding, you’ll find yourself wishing you had my ‘damned money.’”

“Oh, I guess we’ll pull it through,” said the young man.  He rose coolly and walked out of the office.

The afternoon he spent with Mrs. Norman.  He had to go South, he told her, to look after some large interests they had there.  He made the prospects so dazzling that she laughingly suggested that he had better put a little of her money in there for her.  She had quite a snug sum that the Wentworths had given her.

“Why do not you ask Norman to invest it?” he inquired, with a laugh.

“Oh, I don’t know.  He says bonds are the proper investment for women.”

“He rather underestimates your sex, some of them,” said Wickersham.  And as he watched the color come in her cheeks, he added:  “I tell you what I will do:  I will put in fifty thousand for you on condition that you never mention it to a soul.”

“I promise,” she said half gratefully, and they shook hands on it.

That evening he informed his father that he would go South.  “I’ll get those lands easy enough,” he said.

A few days later Ferdy Wickersham got off the train at Ridgely, now quite a flourishing little health-resort, and in danger of becoming a fashionable one, and that afternoon he drove over to Squire Rawson’s.

A number of changes had taken place in the old white-pillared house since Ferdy had been an inmate.  New furniture of black walnut supplanted, at least on the first floor, the old horsehair sofa and split-bottomed chairs and pine tables; a new plush sofa and a new piano glistened in the parlor; large mirrors with dazzling frames hung on the low walls, and a Brussels carpet as shiny as a bed of tulips, and as stiff as the stubble of a newly cut hay-field, was on the floor.