Jim glanced up quickly. “I know the name,” he said, with simplicity, for who did not? “But I don’t remember ever reading of his domestic troubles.”
“No,” she replied. “The scandal was kept out of the papers. He was as successful in explaining away my absence as he had been in explaining away the presence of his mistress. Yes,” she added, in answer to his look of inquiry, “he led the usual double life.”
“Very rich, wasn’t he?” Jim asked.
“Yes, very,” she answered. “But I have never cared much about money. I have always agreed with the man who said ‘Wealth is acquired by over-reaching our neighbors, and is spent in insulting them.’”
“I like money well enough,” said Jim, “but I’ve never been much good at earning it.”
She asked him why he did not send some of his verses to a publisher in England, and talked to him so persuasively in this regard that he promised to consider doing so.
“But if you return to England,” he said, returning to the problem before him, “are there none of your relations who will make it awkward for you and Ian?”
She shook her head. “My father died several years ago, and I was the only child. We have no close relations. You now may as well know his name, too. He was Sir Ian Valory, the African explorer.”
Jim looked at her in surprise. “Why, he was one of my heroes as a boy,” he declared. “I read his books over and over again. This is wonderful!—tell me more.”
But as she did so, there arose a new clamour in his brain. He longed to be able to tell her that his own blood was fit to match with hers. The Tundering-Wests stood high in the annals of exploration and adventure: his ancestors had roamed the world, as Knights of the Cross, as King’s Envoys, as Constables of frontier castles, as Admirals of England. He himself was blood of their blood, and bone of their bone; and his son combined this high heritage with that of Valory.