V
“And now I must go back to a detail that I would much rather not have to touch upon,” said Acey Smith. “But in this account of my stewardship, I promised you I should leave no mystery unexplained, and had not this little matter been attended to I would feel I had been remiss in my duty.
“Some time after the North Star enterprise had been successfully placed on its feet I had a trusted agent locate the whereabouts of Josephine Stone and her mother. He brought back a report that they were living in Calgary, and that the death of the heiress’ father had left them poorly provided for. Joseph Stone’s eccentric will left no alternative in the matter of supplying funds direct from the earnings of his estate to her until she had reached her twenty-first birthday.
“How to supply you with an annuity that would provide for your livelihood and education without leaving it open to discovery where the money came from was one of the most perplexing problems of all I set out to solve. The discovery that your father had been manager of a wholesale produce concern in Edmonton before his health broke down and that he had invented a secret method for preserving eggs for indefinite periods without the use of salt finally gave me an idea. A man was sent to make your mother an offer for the recipe. Fortunately, she had preserved the formula, and she seemed only too delighted to dispose of it to the Kam City Cold Storage Company at a royalty of three thousand dollars a year. It was as much as I dared make the royalty lest—”
Josephine Stone gave a little gasp at thus suddenly learning the real source of the income she and her mother had enjoyed. “And we had thought that all came of father’s genius!”
“But wait,” interposed Acey Smith. “Your father’s invention earned fifty times what the royalty cost each year. The Kam City Cold Storage Company is one of the flourishing subsidiaries of the North Star, and your father’s recipe for storing eggs is used in it to-day. It was the recipe which actually contributed most to its success.”