After some minutes of miserable waiting on my part, the storm spent itself; she sat upright again, dried her eyes upon a bit of handkerchief, and spoke—quite calmly, but terribly in earnest.
"Mr. Swift, I know what your inference is—that Uncle Alfred must be in some way involved—but you don't know all the significance of the flash of understanding that so overwhelmed me. The idea that there could ever have been a love affair between Aunt Clara and Mr. Page is astounding enough"—she glanced at the card—"eighteen fifty-seven: why, she was only a mere slip of a girl then; much younger than I am now!"
It was patent that the revelation had startled and thrilled her; however, there was a more insistent, underlying trouble struggling for expression.
"But—Mr. Swift—do you think that this wheat deal has hurt Uncle Alfred financially?"
Poor child! One could not smile at the simplicity of such a question. I now thought I knew the foundation of this new fear that was gripping at her heart. But I didn't—not entirely; there was another surprise in store for me.
"It is very likely," I soberly made answer.
For all I knew to the contrary, his entire fortune might have been wiped out in the crash; he might have been beggared, stripped utterly; although, since he had not engineered the corner single-handed, he would be obliged to meet only his proportion of the total loss, whatever that might be. An outsider might only guess.
"It is not charitable to think or speak ill of the dead," she was saying, "but, oh! what a cruel, pitiless man Mr. Page was. Think of the long years of persecution Uncle Alfred has had to endure."
But I was regarding the matter from quite a different point of view. I was thinking rather of that broken wheat corner as the culminating stroke of an implacable enemy; of the probability that the rifled safe contained more love-tokens similar to the card—so many more, in fact, that the thief did not miss the one he had lost. I was thinking that the warfare between the two men had its inception much farther back in the past than anybody had ever imagined, and that it was no longer strange why Page had wrested the ruby from his rival. One must consider Fluette's passion for collecting rare gems to appreciate to the full the consummate malice of that coup.
This disturbed pondering, however, carried me round in a circle. If there had been love-tokens in the safe from Clara Cooper, Alfred Fluette was the only man living who would have any interest in getting them from Page. Again, if Page's hatred of Fluette was so intense that he would part with a fortune merely to deprive his rival of a coveted jewel, would he give this same jewel to a nephew for whom he entertained no liking, knowing that the jewel was destined for his enemy, simply upon that nephew's demand? Why, the bare grouping of the facts discredited Maillot's story; he was left in a worse plight than before.