"After I got over being stupefied at the amazing effrontery of the thing—if accepted seriously—I began to do some pretty tall thinking, and I thought rapidly, too.
"'Is that a bargain?' I said at length.
"I spoke quite calmly and seriously, and he favored me with a surprised stare. But he snapped out a curt reply.
"'It is,' said he. 'And I don't give a rap how you get it, either. I wish you success.'
"Was I cast-down and disheartened? Swift—good Lord!—words can't define my feelings. Sly disposition is sanguine enough, but when the blue devils once do get hold of me—well, I 'm all in. I believe I suffer more in the dumps than any other living mortal.
"But somehow or other, that mad proposal stuck by me; it followed me persistently into the depths of my misery and colored all my hopeless cogitations—if only I could get my hands upon that bit of crimson glass! Great Scott, Swift! I believe, had I known where it was and could have gotten at it, I would have stolen it. Yes, sir, sardonically as it was advanced, the proposal to obtain the Paternoster ruby was not to be banished from my mind, and in a day or two I found myself weighing the chances of success.
"Well, the results in favor of accomplishing an undertaking so foolhardy were, even when contemplated in the most favorable light, exactly nil. And then there flashed into my mind a number of questions which—and I trust you 'll believe me when I assert it—had never come to me before: Who was my uncle's heir? To whom, when he died, would the ruby go? Who, or what, was to benefit by all that vast wealth he was so laboriously piling up?
"Now I had—and still have, for that matter—good reasons for believing that I was the only living relative, and of course knew that if he were to die intestate the whole of his property would pass to me simply by operation of law.
"But suppose he had made a will—was it likely that I had been entirely ignored? The drawing of a will is a solemn matter to the party most concerned, and at such a time the tie of blood is apt to urge its claims in a still small voice—a mere whisper, maybe, but astonishingly pertinacious. Therefore, was Mr. Page so indifferent to his only living kin—had all the common feelings of humanity so far evaporated from his heart—that he would remain deaf to that feeble plea?
"The end of this line of thought was a resolution to call upon my uncle, bare my heart to him, and then appeal to him on the strength of our relationship and his loneliness, to aid me. Without presuming that I entertained any expectations from him, still, if he meant to remember me at all, I intended to urge my present necessities as out-weighing every desire and hope of the future.