But the child is the Mordecai at the gate. He must go for her, so he merely picks up the mail that has come and steps back into the carriage. If she could have dared a little more and gone with him, but Floyd Grandon is the kind of man with whom liberties are not easily taken. And perhaps she has won enough for one day. Sometimes in attempting too much one loses all.
CHAPTER VIII.
For I have given you here a thread of mine own life.—Shakespeare.
Floyd Grandon leans back in the carriage and opens Eugene's letter.
"What idiotic stuff have you in your head? Do you think me a baby in leading-strings, or a fool? You may work at that invention until the day of doom, and have fifty experts, and I'll back Wilmarth against you all. He has been trying it for the last six months, and he's shrewd, long-headed, something of a genius himself, and he says it never can succeed, that is, to make money. I am not in the market for matrimonial speculations, thank you, they are rather too Frenchy and quite too great a risk where the fortune is not sure. To think of tying one's self to a little fool brought up in a convent! No, no, no! There, you have my answer. The whole thing may go to the everlasting smash first!"
Grandon folds it very deliberately and puts it in his pocket. The other notes are not important; he merely glances them over. Will Eugene relent when he receives the second appeal? He is not quite sure. But he has done a brother's full duty, and he is honestly sorry that he has failed.
Coming round the walk he sees Cecil in the hammock, and Violet is telling her a fairy story. The doll lies on her arm, and her eyes are half closed. It is such a lovely picture of content, home happiness, that he hates to break in upon it.
"Oh, here is your papa!" cries Violet, who seems to have felt the approach rather than seen it.
"O papa!" There is a long, delightsome kiss, then Cecil sits up straight, her face full of momentous import. "Papa," she says, "why can't we come here to live? I like it so much better than at grandmamma's house. Miss Violet tells prettier stories than Jane, and Denise is so good to me. She made me a little pie."