"No, you didn't know," said he slowly. "A lot of people don't. Now let me tell you a few things more. You didn't know that something like a year ago your father told me that he'd make me a present of fifty-thousand dollars the day I could run a car from the factory to this place on a charge taken from our own overhead receiver-motors."
"A start for a million dollars!" she murmured. "You get that—when you succeed?"
"Yes, that is to say, I could have had that any day in the week these past eight months—if he really has got that much left where he can realize on it. He's pretty well spread out."
"Then you have had it—what have you done with the money?"
"I presume I look as though I'd spent or could spend a mere fifty thousand dollars or so, don't I?" was his quiet answer. "No, I didn't have it, and I haven't got it. I'll say this much to you, however, that I ran my little old car over here to-night on a charge taken out of one of the overhead receiver-motors of the International Power Company—a motor completed on my own ideas, and by my own hands. It's mine, I tell you—mine!"
"Charley!" She caught him by the wrists, with both hands, eagerly. "You can give me the things I've got used to having! I'll go back—oh! I'll go back—we'll go on together! I hate her so—you don't know!"
"That's nice of you, Grace; but you've guessed wrong. I've not got that fifty thousand yet."
"But you can have."
"Yes, I can. What could I buy with it? For one thing, I could buy back my wife?"
"But Charley! We're rich! You've succeeded!"