Ten days after the Easter party, when Quin had almost despaired of seeing Eleanor at all, he found her car parked in front of the house when he returned in the evening. Mounting the front steps two at a time, he opened the door with his latch-key, then paused with his hand still on the knob. Queer sounds were coming from the sitting-room—sounds of a man's agitated voice, broken by sobs. Undeterred by any sense of delicacy, Quin pushed open the door and bolted in.
Mr. Martel was sitting in the arm-chair in an attitude King Lear might have envied. Every line of his face and figure suggested unmitigated tragedy. Even the tender ministrations of Eleanor Bartlett who knelt beside him, failed to console him or to stem the tide of his lamentations.
"What's the matter?" cried Quin in alarm. "What has happened?"
Papa Claude, resting one expressive hand on Eleanor's head, extended the other to Quin.
"Come in, my boy, come in," he said brokenly. "You are one of us: nothing shall be kept from you in this hour of great affliction. I am ruined, Quinby—utterly, irrevocably ruined!"
"But how? What's happened?"
"It's grandmother!" exclaimed Eleanor, struggling to her feet and speaking with dramatic indignation. "She's written him a letter I'll never forgive—never! I don't care if the money is due me. I don't want it. I won't have it! What is six thousand dollars to me if it turns Papa Claude out in the street?"
"But here—hold on a minute!" said Quin. "What's all the racket about?"
"It's about money," Mr. Martel roused himself to explain—"the grossest and most material thing in the world. Years ago Eleanor's father and I entered into a purely personal arrangement by which he advanced me a few thousand dollars in a time of temporary financial depression, and as a mere matter of form I put up this house as security. Had the dear lad lived, nothing more would ever have been said about it. He was the soul of generosity, a prince among men. But, unfortunately, at his death he left his mother Eleanor's trustee."
"And she has simply hounded Papa Claude," Eleanor broke in. "She has tried to make him pay interest on that old note every single year, when she knew I didn't need the money in the least. And now she had notified him she will not renew the note on any terms."