“Don’t—know?” screamed Peggy with a rising inflection and returning hope. “Why don’t you know? Please forgive my awful rudeness, but if you only should prove to be the right one, after all, you know, think what it would mean to Mr. Huntington.”
“My mother died a long time ago,” the young man said. “I was just a small boy. I was to be brought up and educated for one purpose—that of making a great deal of money to—to—well, I might as well tell you, Peggy, I can trust your understanding,—to pay back a debt to my mother’s father—”
He noticed that Peggy’s look of reproach and pain and anxiety had all faded away and in its place was beaming unmitigated delight. It was an expression which seemed to him strangely out of accord with the story he was telling, but, nevertheless, if he could give pleasure to this odd little flyaway creature by the recital of his life’s tragedies, he was willing to do so.
“When I should have amassed a great fortune I was to be told to whom to take it, but until an amount she specified had been gotten together in toto, I wasn’t to know my grandfather’s address for fear I’d want to send him the money we owed bit by bit. And, indeed, I should have wanted that, but for some reason she was unwilling to have anything but the entire huge sum of the debt turned over to him. No part payments in her plan. My father had borrowed the money for some oil ventures out west, and after a good many years those lands have turned out as good as father’s wildest dreams, and I have the money to return to my grandfather—every cent of it—but, listen, Peggy, even you sitting there laughing, with your eyes shining, can understand the tragedy and irony of this—my mother died without ever telling me my grandfather’s name!”
“O—oh,” said Peggy, the smile leaving her face as if it had been suddenly washed away. “That must have bothered you many times.”
Then she looked straight ahead of her thoughtfully for a minute. “It’s strange that the oil wells turned out all right, after all,” she murmured absently. “I’m sure Mr. Huntington never dreamed they would.”
But the boy, swept back into the past by his own story, was raptly gazing into the fireplace and paid no attention to her remark whatever.
“I don’t think it as romantic, your turning out to be rich,” Peggy continued, “as if you had turned out to be poor, the way I thought you would, and then Mr. Huntington would have taken you right in and said the debt was nothing, and he would see that you had everything you wanted. Yes, that would have been the ideal way.”
The boy glanced up at her and smiled whimsically.
“Always that Mr. Huntington,” he said, “who is he?”